At last he left. Loaded down with gifts and memories of the strangest summer of his life.
And my friends left, too. Just enough time to fill the speedboat’s tanks and they were gone. Old Rossini had some business to tend to and the fat man had decided to accompany him.
I remained on land. I missed my jazz woman. But when I got back to Padua I discovered that Pico’s had been shuttered for good. A construction crew was already at work turning it into the branch office of some unfamiliar bank. I felt sadness at the sight of the old sign lying in the rubble.
For several mornings, I staked out Cora’s apartment building. At last I saw her leave. I immediately understood that she had gone back to being Marilena. I simply made my presence known. She looked at me, perhaps she even gave me a slight smile, but she didn’t stop. She kept on walking, straight to her car, started it up, and disappeared around a curve in the road.
I smoked a cigarette but couldn’t thread together anything resembling a complete thought. I felt shattered, as if I’d gone to pieces once and for all, even though I’d always known that my relationship with her was all but bound to end the way it had.
Just then, I was unemployed and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t even feel like getting drunk.
I phoned Antonio Santirocco, the mayor of the blues.
“I need a gig,” I told him.
And so I went back to working with the Triade. Bob on keyboards, Babe on guitar, Antonio on drums, and Stefano, the actor who told tales of blues and criminals.
We traveled every day, and every night we played a different club. And then we wound up in a hotel room with dirty windows, though it hardly mattered: There was never anything interesting to see.
I was living from day to day without much effort, limiting myself to keeping a safe distance from everything, not expecting anything, but not feeling too sorry for myself anymore, either. I met a couple of interesting women. Delia and Giannina. For Giannina in particular it would have been worth quitting the tour and saying farewell to my musician friends, but I kept myself from doing it. For her own good. I didn’t want to do her the dirty trick of vanishing into thin air when I got a certain phone call. Because that’s exactly what would have happened.
I kept on keeping on while waiting for another case where we’d need to step in to help straighten things out. The solution was almost never as simple as determining the truth. We needed to protect our clients’ interests and, as much as possible, put things right, while respecting the rules of free men with outlaw hearts.
EPILOGUE
The fact that life was strange and capable of springing surprises on you when you least expect them was something I’d long known, but I could never have imagined the phone call I got; it was from the last person I expected. It was a lazy late afternoon, and I was sitting at a table at a bar on the piazza of a charming little village in Romagna drinking a beer. My friends from the Triade, the all-Italian organ trio led by the “mayor of the blues” Antonio Santirocco, were shut up in a club doing rehearsals for that evening’s concert. My cell phone starting ringing and I waited until the fourth ring, just for effect.
“This is Giorgio Pellegrini. Don’t hang up.”
The surprise left me speechless. The last time I’d seen him, I’d begged old Rossini to shoot him. Beniamino had refused because we’d promised him immunity to save the life of a kidnap victim. Giorgio Pellegrini was the worst criminal I’d ever met. Murderer, traitor, blackmailer, pimp, rapist. The list of his crimes was long. Too long to allow him to go on living, but he’d proven to be damned cunning, always able to dig himself a bolt-hole of some kind.
The way he’d done with us. He’d fled Padua, pursued by a warrant for his arrest issued by the district attorney and by a promise from Rossini that the next time we met he’d be a dead man.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Do what?”
I heard him sigh. “So you don’t know anything?”
I hadn’t read a paper or listened to the news in days. “I don’t know fuck all,” I blurted out in irritation.
“Martina and Gemma were murdered.”
His wife and his lover. I knew them well. Two fully consensual victims of Pellegrini’s perversions. They’d been dismayed at having been abandoned, but as far as I knew they’d begun running La Nena, the restaurant that handsome Giorgio had made famous all over the region.
“I want to hire you guys,” he said. “I want you and your partners to find out who killed them.”
“You’ve called the wrong person. The only thing I’d be willing to do for you is witness your death.”
“But first you and that museum piece of a friend of yours would have to find me. In the meantime, you can look into the case. You’re mercenaries, you work on contract. I don’t see where the problem is.”
“The problem is you, Pellegrini.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he retorted, all smarm. “Otherwise you’re running the risk of doing it for free because I’m sure that when all is said and done, you’re not going to be able to resist the temptation to stick your noses into it anyway. I know you’re going to want to find out the truth behind the brutal murder of two poor, innocent girls.”
The son of a bitch. I’d forgotten about his uncanny ability to understand people. I changed the subject. “You don’t really give a damn about them, do you?” I accused him.
“Sincerely, not all that much,” he explained, still speaking in that pesky tone. “I’m interested in figuring out who’s behind it, who’s trying to flush me out by murdering my ‘nearest and dearest.’”
“The list of your victims is long enough to fill a local phone book,” I objected. “Just try to imagine how many people go to sleep every night with dreams of taking revenge on you.”
“Revenge has nothing to do with it. The motive for the killings is definitely something else,” he retorted confidently.
“Tell the cops about it,” I suggested. “They’re sure to listen to you, since you’re one of their confidential informants.”
“I used to be. Then we lost touch, the cops and me,” he huffed. “Right now, the police are stumbling around in complete darkness. When the district attorney decides it’s time to get some results, they’ll accuse me of the crime and wrap up the case in the space of a week.”
“Nothing could be simpler.”
“But you’re not going to settle for the official version.”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
He snickered. “I know you, Buratti, I’ve seen you at work. You’re obsessed with the truth, you’re not going to give up a chance to work on this case. I could arrange to advance you fifty thousand euros in a matter of days. The rest when the job is completed.”
“I told you: No!”
“Then you’re going to investigate free of charge. Offering you money was just a nice way of salving your conscience of the grim thought that you’ll be working for a shady character like yours truly.”
Pellegrini hung up and I finished drinking my beer; my hand was trembling slightly. You couldn’t trust that character even when he was telling the truth. He always had a plan, every single move he made was thought out well in advance. And that phone call was no exception.
I held out long enough to drink another beer, and then I rushed out in search of an Internet café so I could dig up some information about the double murder.
When I saw their photographs, I felt sorry for those two poor women. Martina and Gemma had always paid dearly for the joke destiny had chosen to play on them by delivering them into the hands of Giorgio Pellegrini. He’d manipulated them so thoroughly that they had no will of their own. They’d become docile marionettes, and they’d remained loyal to him even after he vanished from their lives.
According to the investigators, they’d been surp
rised by one or more people inside the restaurant just before closing time, when the cooks and the waiters had already left. They’d been forced down into the basement and there they’d been tied up, tortured, and then strangled with piano wire.
The day’s take had been found in Gemma’s purse, ready to be deposited at the bank.
Once robbery was ruled out as a motive, the police shifted their focus to Giorgio Pellegrini’s shadowy past, looked for a motive there. He was currently wanted and on the run.
Nonsense. Too ridiculous to be anything other than a red herring. The investigators had done their best to keep the journalists at bay: At last the press had caught hold of a case they could cover for a good long time to come. In exchange, they’d been tossed a few succulent bones to gnaw on, but the cops and judges had treated Pellegrini with exaggerated care, almost as if they were eager to protect him, forcing the press to fan out in pursuit of leads they knew would play well, but which were devoid of any real investigative basis: gangs from eastern Europe, immigrants who, back home, were professional bandits, serial killers, satanic sects, and other bullshit.
Certainly this had been the work of professionals. At least three. One outside the restaurant, acting as a lookout. And two inside. The fact that piano wire had been used to finish off the two women was a message meant for Giorgio Pellegrini. It said: We’re good at what we do; efficient, dangerous, and lethal.
If what he said was true and the motive wasn’t revenge, then this was the work of a criminal organization powerful enough to have its own well-trained, professional killers. I found myself examining the case as if I really had been hired to investigate, and I had to make a real effort to focus on anything else.
Pellegrini had used the right arguments to capture my interest, but I had no intention of giving in. You simply can’t work for a client you’d like to see dead with all your heart. It’s neither right nor healthy.
I spent the evening with Triade’s purebred blues, but every once in a while, memories of my interactions with Martina and Gemma bubbled dangerously to the surface, and I was forced to thrust them back into a corner of my mind with a healthy shot of calvados.
At six in the morning, the cops entered my room using a skeleton key. They could just as easily have come in two hours later and we all would have gotten more sleep, but there are certain habits that law enforcement isn’t about to break.
I opened my eyes and saw Inspector Campagna, who was, for the occasion, wearing a white and light-blue Hawaiian shirt, sitting on the edge of my bed waving a pair of handcuffs.
“I’ve never understood people who go to a restaurant and then complain to the staff because the portions are too large,” he began while his colleagues started turning the room upside down. “Why don’t they just mind their own fucking business? They complain so much that they talk the proprietors into making portions smaller, and then we’re all worse off. If there’s too much pasta, think of your health and leave it on the plate. Don’t you think so, Buratti?”
“You come all the way down here with your boyfriends to discuss this bullshit?” I asked, my mouth fuzzy with sleep.
“And to take you back to Padua where the pleasure of your presence is requested at police headquarters for a nice little chat.”
“What’s going on, Campagna?” I asked, a little worried now.
“Nothing,” he replied as he handed me my trousers. “It’s just that you still don’t know how to behave at the table and now we’re going to give you a slap on the wrist.”
Padua. Interrogation room at police headquarters.
It was lunchtime, and no one had shown up yet. They’d locked me up in the usual cubbyhole that reeked of sweat, coffee, and stale cigarette smoke, in defiance of Italian law. Of course they’d confiscated my cigarettes.
I was pretty sure they were watching me through the usual two-way mirror. They wanted to make me think I was in real trouble, the kind of trouble that lands you first in court and then in prison for a certain number of years. Maybe it was even true. Maybe Gigliola Pescarotto, the widow Oddo, had decided to rat me out, or else the idea had come to Nicola Spezzafumo. The only thing I had to do was wait to find out just what was happening.
I managed to maintain the calm required for the situation only because I’d been through this kind of thing before, and I knew the world of law enforcement down to the last detail. Deep down, though, I was scared to death. Scared of going to prison.
After another couple of hours, the monotony of which had been interrupted only by a shouting match with the guards standing sentinel to get them to take me to the bathroom, a babe who might have been a cover girl showed up, accompanied by Campagna.
She was blonde, with a ponytail, perfect features, long legs, and tits and an ass that looked as if they’d been drawn by a master illustrator. She sat down across the table from me, smoothed down the hem of her designer skirt suit, and looked me up and down with an assertive air.
Then she gestured to Campagna, who hastened to turn on a small tape recorder. It must have been a very good brand, because you could hear both my voice and Pellegrini’s perfectly.
I heaved a sigh of relief. The situation I was in wasn’t all that serious after all.
“Giorgio Pellegrini has started using the SIM card of the cell phone that he had when he was still in Padua,” the official explained. “That’s why we were able to record the phone call.”
The bastard had to have known that the investigators would be ready to listen. I wondered why he’d chosen to bring them into the middle of all this. Maybe so he could inform them of his innocence. Or else, no, that son of a bitch had decided to frame me and hand me over to the cops. Distracted by my complex reasoning, I missed the beginning of what the good-looking female cop was telling me and interrupted her very politely, asking if she could start over again from the beginning.
“Are you dimwitted? Stupid? Do you suffer from some kind of mental pathology? Or did your mother give you syphilis during pregnancy?” the woman asked, speaking in machine gun bursts in a strong Milanese accent. “Do you think we had you brought so we could chat? Or do you just think that we don’t deserve your attention?”
Any thoughts of kindness suggested by her attractive appearance vanished at that moment. “With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” I asked.
She pointed to her underling. “With Inspector Giulio Campagna,” she replied, her voice flat.
“What’s that mean?”
“Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
I, too, knew that game. The only way to defend yourself was to interrupt the stream of questions, because you’d never get an answer. Just more questions.
The official waited for me to respond, then went straight to the point. “We want you to accept Pellegrini’s offer and investigate the murders. With your friends, of course. We won’t interfere.”
I would have liked to know whom she meant with that “we.” And, after all, it was pretty clear that it was going to end badly for everyone, and not just for Pellegrini. There wasn’t a single good reason to offer her our heads on a silver platter. We’d have done their dirty work for them and all we’d get in exchange would be a cell with a view of the yard in a maximum-security prison. That is, unless the whole deal was so filthy that the only thing to do was clean house, top to bottom, an operation that would involve executions and shallow graves.
“No,” I said, addressing Campagna.
“No?” the policewoman echoed, raising her voice and jumping to her feet. “Listen good, you miserable piece of shit,” she hissed. “Unless you do exactly as I say, your friends are going to wind up in prison. We know where they are and the minute they touch land we’ll search the Sylvie and find just enough kilos of heroin and cocaine to bring down a minimum sentence of fifteen years. Rossini’s a tough character and he can do the time, even if he’ll go straight into a hospice when he�
��s released, but Max, with his health problems, won’t survive more than four years, five, tops.”
She reached out her hand and Campagna gave her a file, which she slapped under my nose. It was Max’s hospital chart. It looked like the original.
“We’ve had it examined by one of our experts,” the policewoman went on. “What I tell you is the truth and I can assure you that we’ll make it our business to ensure that every day behind bars will be a ‘special’ one for him.”
Maybe she was bluffing. Or maybe she wasn’t. I was too confused to figure that out. I tested the ground by, again, refusing outright.
“The little turd has a pair of balls on him,” the woman commented, feigning admiration. She leveled her forefinger at me, straight and long as a gun barrel. “Meanwhile, you’ll be out, free and at large. We’ll circulate a rumor that you were the one who sold out your friends, and that you’re now a police informant.”
“No one’s going to fall for that,” I shot back ferociously.
Campagna walked over and leaned close, placing a hand on my shoulder. “She’s not like normal human beings,” he said, referring to his superior officer. “She comes from another planet where playing dirty is the rule. She’ll screw you unless you do what she says.”
“She’ll screw us whatever we do,” I thought to myself.
The woman burst into a forced laugh. “Campagna, you’re as pathetic as those shirts of yours. I’m going to ask the chief of police why on earth he lets you wear them. Now get out of this room.”
The inspector obeyed, paying no heed to the insult.
The official sat down again. “All right then, Buratti, what’s your decision?”
“It seems to me I have no choice.”
The lady cop gave me a long, hard, derisive look. “You’re all the same,” she commented; then she ordered me to send a text to Pellegrini, accepting the case and the money.
For All the Gold in the World Page 16