For All the Gold in the World

by Massimo Carlotto

  “But if Fecchio wants to seek out justice himself and causes us any harm, we’re going to consider you responsible.”

  “That sounds very much like a threat,” I told my friends.

  “Heavens,” the fat man added. “I would never have expected it, but we’re dealing with two eminently respectable criminal minds here.”

  Beniamino was in no mood for irony. “We’ve done you the considerable courtesy of apprising you of the situation, even though we had no obligation to do so, since you’re not our clients. In the course of this meeting, you’ve insulted us and threatened us.

  “In accordance with our rules, right now I should pull out my gun and make you swallow every word you just uttered. But we’re good-hearted people and we’re going to give you a second chance; because we brought you bad news today, you got scared, and all the bullshit you just spouted is the product of ill-advised improvisation. So we invite you to think carefully, because we’re not going to give you a third chance.”

  “Improvisation only makes sense in jazz,” I muttered for no particular reason. Maybe because I’d have rather spent that time with Cora, instead of sitting in Siro Ballan’s living room.

  Spezzafumo and the widow left and we sat in silence, thinking, smoking cigarettes and sipping little glasses of liquor.

  Civilians often have no idea that the inner workings of the underworld are so twisted that criminals turn to violence because it may be the only way to find a simple solution. Especially for minds like that of Nick the Goldsmith. Gigliola Pescarotto herself was hardly a genius, though she was certainly more clever than he was. It couldn’t have been complicated for her to put together that gang and dominate that group of men. The problem was that the losers would drag the winners down into ruin with them. It was all apparently so absurd, but there actually was a sense to the logic that had led to the clash between those two gangs of armed robbers, albeit a horrendously perverse one.

  Greed and contempt for human life on the one hand, and on the other a deranged and exaggerated idea of justice and property. An explosive blend, and we’d just relit the fuse.

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have been a terrible idea to get rid of Spezzafumo,” Max muttered.

  Old Rossini ran his hand over his forehead. “The worst idea imaginable, if you ask me, though it’s no good hoping that Spezzafumo is just going to go away. He’s one of those losers who survive because they’re not afraid of going to prison and they think they’re too clever to be killed. A soldier. It’s no accident that he gets his marching orders from that witch, the widow Oddo.”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “What we’ve been talking about doing for quite some time now: hunt down Fecchio’s accomplices,” Beniamino replied. “We need to know all the pieces on the board if we want to figure out if there’s a solution.”

  “What if we don’t find one?”

  “We’ll board the Sylvie and leave the party. And every month we’ll send a little money to the boy.”

  Right. We were the only ones with nothing to lose. And we were the only ones who would keep our word, whatever the cost, and look after Sergio. Someone needed to come out the other end of that horrible mess.

  Tracking down Kevin’s mysterious partners wasn’t going to be easy. These were people with no connections to the underworld, without criminal records. To join the goldsmith in that undertaking meant that they’d been through the same things. An armed robbery, one of their family members murdered. They felt sure they were on the side of the angels and they’d be an endless source of problems, right up to the very end.

  PART TWO

  A farmer noticed the car parked, one of its doors open, by the side of a canal and gave the alarm. The fire department scuba team took a couple of hours to find the corpse tangled in the vegetation on the bottom.

  The news of Kevin Fecchio’s death flooded the entire region. All the media outlets discussed it, especially the many local TV broadcasters who almost immediately subscribed to the theory of a suicide. The portrait that was offered to local public opinion was that of a healthy country boy with solid Venetian roots who had been devastated by a twist of fate and found himself struggling beneath the weight of a terrible tragedy.

  The thing that drove him to it was identified as the total lack of justice for the murder of Maicol. No one had been arrested, tried, and sentenced. And Kevin, who had fought so hard for the rights of citizens to self-defense, hadn’t been able to contain the grief and regret that had devoured him.

  The local journalists didn’t mince words when it came to the authorities or to his wife, who was guilty of having abandoned him, and depriving him of his children’s love. They called her a whore, and there was no appealing that judgment.

  The autopsy revealed nothing out of the ordinary that might point to other theories. The considerable quantity of alcohol found in his stomach had no scientific explanation but journalists and columnists had no doubt that it had helped him screw up the necessary courage.

  We were the only ones who were convinced that Kevin Fecchio hadn’t intentionally thrown himself into that miserable little river. Truth be told, Nicola Spezzafumo must have shared our views because he hurried to see us, swearing that he’d had nothing to do with it and announcing he’d be suddenly heading off on an overseas vacation.

  A multitude of citizens attended the funeral. The church, which had stated, through the person of the bishop, that there could be no doubt that the dearly departed had been the victim of a tragic accident, had organized a service befitting a prominent member of the community.

  A gigantic lie had become an official truth with all the blessings.

  We’d blended in with the mourners and were studying the faces of the men in search of the slightest clue that might point us in the right direction. I worked my way into the knot of law-and-order proponents, now orphaned of one of their most outspoken leaders, and listened to muttered comments that proved worthless.

  A cathartic burst of applause greeted the coffin when it emerged into the open air.

  “I don’t want to see anyone clapping their hands at my funeral,” Max muttered.

  “They won’t,” I reassured him. “You’ve made your wishes clear.”

  Each of knew the last wishes of the others, since there was no way to know in advance the order of departure. They faithfully reflected what and who we were, and they all had in common the absence of a service of any kind, and cremation. To tiptoe off the stage as light as cinders. In part because there’s nothing worse than a half-deserted graveside.

  The crowd began to scatter and the bars started filling up. It was almost noon and most of the orders were for white wine or spritzes.

  Max asked the waiter to mix equal parts Aperol and Campari for his spritz. The man nodded, his grimace that of someone who’s heard it all in his lifetime and thinks that just one more can’t make things any worse.

  Beniamino ordered a fine Sauvignon. “I’m sick and tired of this ritual of the spritz,” he said. “Frankly, it doesn’t seem good enough to go crazy over.”

  Max was in agreement. “There’s better, no doubt. And really, we ought to go back to the classic ‘ombra’ of wine or else to more serious aperitifs, in terms of alcohol, too.”

  Rossini pointed at the fat man’s glass. “Then why do you drink it?”

  “It’s another lost battle and I’ve just decided to fit in,” he replied, his voice serious. “That way, I have something in common with all these nice people.”

  The old bandit looked at me. “When he starts theorizing about even the stupidest things, I can’t stand him.”

  “He just can’t bring himself to admit that he can’t live without it,” I explained. “The same thing happens to me, anyway. It’s cool, it’s light, and I don’t care if it’s fashionable.”

  “You’ll never take me alive,” Beniamino reiterat
ed.

  We’d have gone on discussing this relevant, crucial topic for a good long time if we hadn’t been distracted by a fight that broke out among a group of customers. Sante Zanella, Kevin’s childhood friend, was ready to rearrange the facial features of a compatriot who had suggested that the deceased had been “a bit of drunk.”

  Many others intervened to calm things down, and we took advantage of the opportunity to observe Sante from up close. We’d already ruled him out as an accomplice in the Oddo home invasion, but he was one of the two people closest to Fecchio, and it was hard to believe that he was entirely in the dark.

  The other man apologized, trotting out the old theory that any Venetian is liable to have one drink too many in his own defense. And it was then that Sante supplied us with a very interesting piece of information: The “misfortune” had occurred on a Wednesday. Kevin, however, liked to drink a glass or two on Friday and Saturday night, since he wouldn’t have to go in to work the next morning. He would never, ever allow his employees to see him working off a hangover. That was one of Maicol’s rules and he would never have betrayed his brother’s memory.

  And to Sante, this was proof that his friend’s death was a suicide, the suicide note that Kevin hadn’t managed to write.

  The others all fell silent and at that moment I would have loved to tell them that actually, the abundance of alcohol in Fecchio’s stomach was proof that he’d been murdered by his accomplices. The very same people with whom he’d planned and carried out a home invasion that involved grand larceny and, worse, double homicide.

  Kevin Fecchio was radioactive, and they’d decided he was too risky to keep around.

  His partners had rid themselves of him in clever, elegant fashion after learning that three thugs had laid an ambush for him in the home of a prostitute and that he had blabbed indiscriminately because he’d been positive he’d been dealing with the Spezzafumo gang.

  It had become necessary to murder him to burn all bridges linking them back to their crimes, to keep anyone from being able to trace their real identities.

  From the very beginning we’d been betting that the notorious recording of Oddo’s confession, whether or not it actually existed, wouldn’t surface.

  Fecchio’s murderers had no interest in bringing the cops into the matter. The case would have drawn so much attention that the minister of the interior himself would have been bound to provide men and resources to bring them to justice.

  A case that seemed destined to explode, taking with it everyone connected to it, had been defused with a simple murder. Everything had been hushed up and both Kevin’s accomplices and the widow Oddo could count on getting off scot-free.

  But we couldn’t toe the party line. Our client hadn’t obtained satisfaction of any kind and as far as we were concerned the investigation continued.

  Beniamino went back to Punta Sabbioni and to his jaunts aboard the Sylvie. He had no interest in suffering the brutal heat that had been forecast for some time, and which was now slowly roasting the Po Valley. Padua was like a flaming match and the old bandit abandoned us to our fate, a prolonged and complex phase of the investigation: scouring old news records for any case that might have something in common with the crime that had first changed Kevin Fecchio’s life and figuring out whether any of the victims had ever subsequently crossed paths with him.

  We were convinced that to forge an understanding strong enough to form a gang, they couldn’t live very far apart. They must have spent time together and become intimate, a path punctuated by a long series of encounters steeped in hatred, resentment, and bitterness. Their grief over the things they’d suffered had sent them straight to hell, and they’d made up their minds to stay there.

  So we started to focus on the most savage crimes perpetrated in the province of Vicenza.

  Max looked up from the folder of newspaper clippings he was perusing. “The first time I seriously considered seeking revenge was when they killed my Marielita.”

  I felt, as I always did, a stabbing pain in my chest. For me too that was a particularly painful memory. She’d died in my arms, hit by a burst of bullets fired by the local mafia that had dominated Veneto back then—at least until the clan’s capo, Tristano Castelli, sold his gang out to the state like some bankrupt corporation.

  “And the death of her murderers actually made me feel better,” he added after a brief pause.

  “Revenge always provides a healthy dose of satisfaction and comfort, even though its limitations are unmistakable since it’s incapable of restoring to you that which has been taken,” I commented with considerable conviction. “And in any case, it must be an act of justice. The exact opposite of the barbarity of Fecchio and company.”

  “I still don’t really understand why they acted like butchers in a splatter flick. If they’d limited themselves to murdering Spezzafumo and taking back the gold, no one would have really objected.”

  I slapped my chest. “Because they don’t have outlaw hearts,” I shot back. “If civilians decide to go beyond the bounds of their laws, they lose all sense of proportion. Even when all they’re doing is embezzling public funds. They turn into sharks, they become predators.”

  “It’s not that simple, Marco.”

  “I think it is. Those three let themselves go and commit truly vile acts because they were convinced they had the right to do so. They went into that villa certain they’d be absolved of their sins because they were sure their victims were guilty, and as such deserving of nothing but contempt.”

  “And once we got involved, Kevin was sacrificed because he was endangering the impunity of the two others.”

  “A preemptive murder,” I pointed out. “These people weren’t born yesterday.”

  “And I’m pretty sure they’ll have other surprises in store for us,” the fat man added, going back to his reading.

  Between the Internet and Max’s archives we managed to reconstruct a bloody map of armed robberies carried out against villas, goldsmiths’ workshops, and jewelry shops. Organized crime had given up the tradition of robbing banks in grand style and had focused in on private citizens, who were less able to defend themselves.

  Terror and brutal violence. The Oddo home invasion numbered among the cruelest in a long list of tragedies. And for the cops it was never easy to track down the culprits. The Northeast of Italy was a borderland and the gangs attacked and then retreated with the greatest of ease.

  The contempt for human life displayed by this new brand of globalized crime sent shivers down the collective spine. For that matter, it was perfectly in line with the attitudes that now dominated the world. And there wasn’t the slightest indication that things were going to improve.

  On the third day we identified a possible candidate. It was Sunday and in Greece the people were about to vote in a referendum that would decide their economic future. The rest of Europe applauded this pretense of democracy at gunpoint.

  The man we were looking for might very well prove to be a certain Ferdinando Patanè, age fifty-four. He’d come up from southern Italy at the end of the seventies and opened a jewelry shop in the center of Dolo, one of the most prominent towns along the Riviera del Brenta.

  In the winter of 2009 two distinguished gentlemen with “Slavic” accents entered and pulled out their guns. Patanè’s son, Lorenzo, age twenty-one, a promising engineering student at the university of Padua, was in the rear of the shop. The robbers shot him in the back while he was facing the wall because, according to their unappealable judgment, the father had been too slow to provide certain answers.

  The young man survived, miraculously, but was left paralyzed from the neck down. His mother Geraldina had told the story of the family’s tragedy with great courage and dignity. She tracked down local journalists and pushed them to keep the public informed about her boy, who no longer had a future.

  Patanè, the father, on the other ha
nd, had been reluctant to talk. It seems that he was torn by a sense of guilt at not having been able to reach the handgun he kept in a drawer. He’d shut down his business without fanfare and devoted himself to his son. Rumors circulated in town: that the jewelry shop was insured for a ridiculously small sum and that the merchandise that had been stolen was worth a large fortune. Mistakes you pay for.

  Maicol and Kevin Fecchio were among the very few who had come to express their solidarity, a moment immortalized by a photographer at the front entrance of the hospital where Lorenzo had been taken. Patanè was a loyal client of theirs, as the two brothers had explained to the reporters, and “the tribulations they were experiencing constituted an endless injustice that could be blamed on a state that had long ago given up its responsibility to protect merchants and businessmen, allowing criminal gangs from eastern Europe to ride roughshod over the territory.”

  The statement had clearly been tweaked by the author of the article but the concept was clear.

  The jeweler had repaid the courtesy by attending Maicol Fecchio’s funeral. The two men must have cultivated a pretty solid friendship because Patanè had locked arms with Kevin.

  After the service, Patanè, recognized by the journalists, had given a series of very short statements all of the same tenor: death penalty, right to self-defense, absent and impotent government.

  We’d found pictures and reports of their friendship up until a couple of months prior to the robbery in the Oddo villa. Then nothing. The ex-jeweler hadn’t showed up at Kevin Fecchio’s funeral, and he’d probably produced some credible excuse, since nobody had commented on his absence.

  Instinct and experience told us that we’d tracked down one of Kevin’s accomplices. But there was a very persuasive argument that he’d had nothing to do with the torture and the murders. Kevin was a strong man, in tip-top shape, perfectly capable of slipping a ski mask over his head and carrying out a violent crime, while Ferdinando Patanè was short, skinny, and frail-looking. He certainly wasn’t a man of action and we could safely rule out the idea that he’d set foot in the villa. Up until then, our theory had been that the group was made up of three men. But if Patanè was a part of the conspiracy, as we suspected he was, then it meant that there was a fourth man. At least.