“How many people are we talking about? Three, four, five? I don’t think it would be too much trouble to investigate them thoroughly.”
“Nicola’s already done that.”
“It’s not his profession. He certainly overlooked important clues.”
She sprang to her feet. “This whole story is buried with the dead.”
I sat there and gave her a long, hard look while I tried to come up with the right words to make her understand she was just kidding herself. “Nick Spezzafumo won’t be satisfied with my refusal. Sooner or later the lid’s going to come off this thing. Some stories you can never shake.”
Province of Pordenone. The next day.
Near the main gate, the fence surrounding the well-known appliance factory was covered in dirty, tattered union signs and banners. They were all that remained in the wake of the strike’s defeat. At the end of the shift, the few workers left trickled out and got into the cars parked on the other side of the road. Max and I were leaning against the side of a white Fiat Panda, smoking cigarettes. A man in a jumpsuit headed straight for us.
“That’s my car!” he said in an aggressive tone.
“Are you Arnaldo Cantarutti?” I asked, extending my hand.
He refused to shake it. “Who are you?” he demanded suspiciously.
I pointed to my partner. “His name is Max, I’m Marco. We’re private investigators and we’re working on the robbery that resulted in your sister’s death.”
“Get out of here,” he ordered. “You’re not the first to try and cheat us out of our cash so you can pretend to investigate.”
“We don’t want your money,” the fat man broke in. “We just want to talk about Luigina.”
“Are you missionaries, do you work for free?” he mocked us as he pulled his car keys out of his pocket.
I decided to lie. “We were hired by a lawyer. A client of his had his house broken into by a gang of three men. He’s convinced it was the same people who invaded Oddo’s villa.”
“Identifying the culprits also means obtaining damages,” Max added. “In order to avoid life sentences without parole, these kinds of criminals are always inclined to indemnify their victims.”
“They deserve to die for what they did to Luigina,” the man muttered. “But it’s also true that a little extra money wouldn’t hurt. Ever since Sergio came to live with us, there’s never enough money. At first she helped us out with her salary as a housekeeper, but after the funeral everything changed. I love the boy, but my wife isn’t always so patient. He doesn’t have any other relatives. His grandparents are too old and they’re sick. Taking care of the boy always means depriving our own two kids of something they want. If this keeps up, we’ll have to send him to an orphanage.”
“One more reason to accept our help,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes.
“I’m not signing anything,” he retorted promptly.
Max flashed a door-to-door salesman’s smile. “There’s no need. All we’d need is to chat for a few minutes about your sister.”
The factory worker glanced at his watch. “There’s not much to say. She was a good soul, a hard worker, but a little slow. I don’t know if you get what I’m saying . . . She was attractive and men tood advantage of her. Sergio’s father hit the road right away, he never meant to acknowledge the kid as his son. And Luigina never recovered. She tried to find another man who might really love her, but when Sergio turned eight she took a housekeeping job so she could get out of this town. The Oddo family was fond of her. They treated her respectfully and let her believe she was the governess while she was actually nothing more than a simple housecleaner who also did the cooking.”
“She was a really good cook, you know?” he added after a short pause, lost in some memory. “Her mother taught her.”
Luigina’s life could be summarized in just a few words, many of them not especially flattering. Only as a cook was she really up to snuff. And yet, in that whole mess, she was the only one who deserved justice and reparations. I’d finally realized who our client could be.
“Do you think it might be possible for us to meet Sergio?” I asked.
“He never talks about what happened to his mother.”
“Just for the report,” the fat man lied. “Lawyers are always such sticklers.”
Cantarutti shrugged. “At this time of day, he’s at the parish church, kicking the ball around the soccer field.”
The grass on the field grew in isolated clumps. The rest was bare dirt. The kids kicked up clouds of dust as thick as talcum powder. They were playing a game of pickup soccer, shouting and laughing. It was a pleasure to watch them. Our presence didn’t pass unobserved. A man in his early thirties with a stack of photocopies under his arm and a gold cross around his neck strode toward us briskly.
“We’d like to talk to Sergio Cantarutti,” said Max.
“We have his uncle’s permission,” I added, to stave off the usual questions.
The man gestured to a fair-haired boy to come over. “These gentlemen are here to speak with you,” he explained, before heading off.
According to the only photo of her we had been able to find on the Internet, the boy took after his mother. Forehead, nose, the shape of his lips. But his eyes were dark. He wasn’t tall, but he had broad shoulders. He seemed ill at ease.
“Can we buy you an ice-cream cone?” asked Max, pointing to the parish church café.
“I just want to go back to my game.”
“All we need is five minutes of your time,” I explained.
“What for?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“We’re private investigators,” I replied. “Like the ones in the movies. We want to find out who hurt your mother, but in order to be able to investigate, we need a client who’ll give us a retainer, which means money to hire us. As the next of kin, that would have to be you.”
Now he was frightened, uncomfortable. “Uncle Arnaldo says that we have to resign ourselves, that no one will ever figure out the truth.”
“We’re the best investigators on the market, and we’re cheap, too,” I retorted, holding out my hand. “Just hand over your spare change, and we can start working for you.”
With clear misgivings, he stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out twenty cents, and laid the coins on my palm.
Both Max and I solemnly shook his hand and a few seconds later he was already running to rejoin his friends.
As soon as we walked out the gate, Max touched my arm. “Are we sure we know what we’re doing?”
“No,” I replied in all sincerity. I showed him the coins. “But we do have certain responsibilities toward our client.”
“Seriously though, Marco,” he said; he’d stopped short and was refusing to go on. “Why are you dragging us into this fucked-up mess? The widow Oddo told us loud and clear she wants no part of this and that little boy may be sad as all hell, but he can hardly be considered a client.”
“Maybe I just can’t stand the idea of the truth staying buried,” I snapped back, raising my voice, “or the idea that there’s just one victim too many, with one child too many, and that they’re liable to be shit out of luck for the rest of eternity.”
“Got it,” he blurted, and started walking again. “We can’t just look the other way.”
“We have our rules,” I pointed out.
Max shot me an ironic little grin. “Remember who you’re talking to.”
“All right, okay,” I said, giving in. “I need a case. A dirty, difficult, dangerous case. Otherwise I’ll go to pieces, I’m already teetering on the edge.”
“Then this one seems perfect to me,” the fat man commented.
After taking Max home I continued on toward Vicenza. Edoardo “Catfish” Fassio, a real blues expert, the only true Italian “blue-jay,” was spinning that night in a club in the provinces.
“Everyone says the blues is dead but here we still are,” he said as he poured me a glass of red.
“The blues just don’t know how to give up.”
We toasted to the devil’s music and he took the opportunity to give me the once-over. “You’ve got the face of someone who’s not going to make it unless he gets a horse-pill sized dose of good old-fashioned blues.”
“I’ve been prescribing myself a lot of Susan Tedeschi.”
“She’s good and she’s cute,” he noted as he slid his hand into a bag he kept by his side, “but you need more powerful injections.”
He set a few CDs down in front of me. His famous mixtapes. “Start with this,” he added, pointing to one entitled Night Stalker, Missy Andersen’s old warhorse.
“Thanks, Catfish.”
He went and sat down at his booth onstage. A few minutes later, people were dancing as he put on records and recounted juicy anecdotes about the singers. All while repeating that people who didn’t like the blues could go fuck themselves.
Two hours later he came back and sat down at the table, but by then I was too out of it to carry on a conversation. The owner knew me and let me sleep on a bench. When I woke up the next morning, I found the bartender restocking the bar. He made me an espresso and gave me a message from Catfish. “He paid the tab, but next time it’s your treat.”
“Big tab?”
He laughed before answering. “I haven’t seen a drinker like you in quite some time.”
I hoped that was a compliment, and lit the first cigarette of the day.
“You can take the alcohol out of the blues, but you can’t take the blues out of the alcohol,” I philosophized, trying to set a slightly more dignified tone as I headed for the door.
I began the round of therapy Catfish had prescribed by listening to the first CD, and by the time I opened the door to my home I felt oppressed by an unmotivated sadness. That’s the way it works with the blues, you start over from the bottom and then you try to pull yourself back up.
“A woman?” the fat man asked; he was, as usual, engrossed with the day’s papers.
“A bottle,” I replied, heading for the bathroom. I needed a shower.
I took it slow, and gave up on the idea of shaving after a couple of misguided attempts. I was still pretty drunk.
When I got back to the living room, I was met with a bear hug from Beniamino. As usual, he was impeccably garbed. He was wearing a light wool, hazel brown, double-breasted suit, and a pair of leather shoes in bordeaux that looked quite expensive. The knot in his tie was perfect.
“Satisfied with your new boat?” I asked.
He smiled. “To call her a boat doesn’t do her justice, but in any case, yes, I’m satisfied, and she’s already earned me a few thousand euros.”
“Have you gone back to smuggling?”
“If a good opportunity turns up, I won’t let it pass me by.”
Max uncorked a bottle of white wine. “I brought Beniamino up-to-date on the story that Spezzafumo told you.”
I darted an inquisitive look in his direction. “Well?”
Old Rossini tasted the wine. “Nothing to write home about,” he commented. “Exactly like this case. As far as I’m concerned, I’m pretty sure we have no real right to be digging into it, but it’s also true that I’ve always hated those pieces of shit who do home invasions, and the housekeeper and her son have every right to fair retribution.”
“So?” I insisted.
“We have to give it a try, but we can’t hope for too much. If in two years neither the cops nor Spezzafumo found so much as a single clue, I doubt we’ll be able to.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. “So where do we start?”
“I know a guy who scouts out kidnapping targets in the Treviso area,” Beniamino replied.
“Nice people you hang out with,” Max kidded him.
“Wait until you see how happy he is to see us,” Rossini snickered.
Toni Brugnera had never bothered to find himself a cover. Everyone knew that he was supported by his wife, who owned a popular beauty spa. Between eleven in the morning and dinnertime, he could be found in any of a number of cafés and bars in the center of town, both recounting and collecting gossip. The gossip he liked best had to do with money, and how much of it people living in isolated villas had, especially if that money was being hidden from the tax authorities. And when he had hot gossip, Toni shared it with Nella Povellato, his longtime mistress, who, in turn, would turn it over to her daughter’s live-in boyfriend, the Croatian gangster Franko Didulica.
Franko had a group of trusted friends who could cross the border, pull off a job, and get back home before the loot had even been missed.
Toni and Beniamino had met when the scout had gone to Beniamino to ask if a member of the gang, who’d been wounded in a shoot-out with a security guard, could hitch a ride in Beniamino’s speedboat.
Rossini had turned down the job because he believed that cowards who assaulted defenseless families in their homes were true scum. Brugnera had raised his voice, and gone home with a face swollen from Rossini’s fists. Didulica had threatened revenge, but he’d given that up once he realized it wasn’t in his interest to make an enemy of the Italian who boasted dangerous friendships in Croatian smuggling circles.
That morning, when Toni walked out his front gate, he saw Beniamino step out of his luxurious sedan and invite him to come for a ride. And Toni turned white as a sheet.
“I’m not coming,” he said in dialect as he bent over to peer inside the car. We both gave him a friendly wave.
“We just want to talk to you,” the old bandit clarified. “Don’t force me to hurt you.”
The scout pointed to the corner of his building. “The video camera’s filmed it all, so be careful.”
“I see you’ve taken precautions,” Beniamino commented ironically. “And I can’t blame you, what with all the sewer rats out there ready to rob the homes of respectable citizens.”
The man got in back and sat down next to me. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked aggressively.
“What do you know about the robbery at the Oddo family’s home two years ago?” I asked, point-blank.
“The place in Piove di Sacco?”
“Yes.”
He raised both hands. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said, still in dialect. “Two dead for fifty thousand euros’ worth of swag—that’s crazy. I’d always assumed that junkies did the job, but the fact that they never caught them made me change my mind. Maybe the robbery was cover for a revenge killing. I heard that Gastone Oddo liked exotic pussy.”
“And who told you that?”
“It was a rumor that was going around at the time.”
I exhaled loudly. That asshole didn’t know anything useful.
“What crews were operating at the time?” Rossini asked.
“A dozen local scouts for a dozen gangs. Serbs, Bulgarians, Croatians, Romanians, Sinti, Neapolitans, and guys from Bergamo,” he replied. “But believe me, none of them had anything to do with what happened.”
Beniamino put on his blinker and pulled over. “Get out,” he ordered.
Brugnera didn’t have to be told twice; he walked off briskly, cursing us under his breath.
“So now we can be certain that the crews that specialize in robberies had nothing to do with that one,” Max said.
“Spezzafumo’s right. We’re going to have to search for a one-off gang,” I added, opening a new pack of cigarettes.
“And the traitor,” old Rossini specified. “We need to go back and talk with Nick the Goldsmith or the widow.”
“Better if we talk to Gigliola,” I replied. “Spezzafumo and his boys have ugly intentions and
if they find out we’re digging, they’ll demand to know what we’ve turned up.”
At lunch, Gigliola Pescarotto, the widow Oddo, made do with a salad, half a liter of mineral water, and an espresso with two teaspoonsful of sugar. She ate lunch alone at a reserved table in a café that was just a few hundred yards away from the knitwear plant. Thanks to the twenty-euro note I’d slipped the waitress, on that day, she found her table occupied by yours truly and two men she’d never met before. I greeted her and waved her over.
“We’ll be a little bit cramped but we need to talk with you,” I explained after introducing Max and Beniamino.
“Are these gentlemen also aware of everything that happened?” she asked in a low voice.
“These are my partners. And my best friends,” I replied, trying to reassure her.
“I’m not interested. I already told you I was done with this story.”
“There are some new developments,” I said. “We now have a client who’s hired us to find out more.”
“And who would that be?”
“Sergio, Luigina Cantarutti’s son.”
“But he’s just a boy,” she exclaimed, scandalized. “What kind of people are you, anyway?”
“Perfectly respectable,” Beniamino said, cutting things short. “And in any case, you have no say in the matter. You need to trust us and give us all the necessary information.”
She pushed her plate away with an angry gesture. “You’re reckless fools. It’ll be your fault when they take my little girl away from me.”
“That won’t happen,” I retorted. “But speaking of children, Sergio’s likely to wind up in an orphanage because his uncle doesn’t make enough money to support him and his aunt doesn’t want him living with them. You ought to meet him, he’s a nice kid.”
After the espresso, we went outside to smoke a cigarette. “What do you want to know?” the woman asked, her voice resigned.
“What would happen when Spezzafumo brought you the loot from the robberies?” Rossini asked.
“The jewelry was melted down into twenty- and fifty-gram gold bars.”
For All the Gold in the World Page 3