Rome Noir

by Chiara Stangalino

  The Americans, from what is gathered from the movies they export all over the planet, value the family a great deal.

  Joe leans close to his boss and whispers: “It’s already too late. They did it. They moved the fault.”

  “Get in the car, we’ll see what we can do.”

  They begin shooting, thirty shots from the Beretta Px4 Storms riddle the car and the car is bulletproof. It’s all over in an instant, in a few seconds the Third Service Italian ambulance is on the scene: It was ready and waiting a hundred meters back. There’s a street accident to be cleaned up, an Italian-American tourist killed by Roman bandits.

  In Venice, as the widowed Mrs. Spiazzi finally conquers her insomnia, a slight chink makes the pupils of the mural appear walleyed: Jim Morrison’s gaze slips, but keeps staring long after he’s gone.

  1988

  BY NICOLA LAGIOIA

  Via Appia Antica

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  Saverio Candito, Giancarlo Colasanti, Danilo Giovinazzo. My best friends. We grew up together in the flamboyant prosperity of the last economic miracle. Out of an absurd desire for revenge, or maybe because we were imbeciles, we decided at a certain point to vex our parents by devoting ourselves to an activity that at the time, 1988 more or less, around Rome and all over Italy, still represented a real scandal. And this is our epilogue.

  The police cars arrived, sirens off, around 4 in the afternoon. They circled in vain a few times, cleaving the banks of hot air in which the neighborhood languished. Then, by dint of trial and error, they turned onto the right street. The roadway narrowed, forcing them to go single file. They downshifted to second gear near a villa surrounded by plaster discus throwers and other travesties of good taste that even the ignorance of our professors of design would have called “an obscenity.” They slowed further and turned off their engines. Now they were stopped behind a Testarossa, each of whose wheel rims was worth the annual salary of the ten men in uniform who, with the excuse of cutting short a crime, did the same thing to my adolescence.

  The Ferrari Testarossa was not the only plow tracing the furrow that separated the lovers of excess from the rest of the world: those without significant desires, high-school teachers, family men who month after month put away the leftovers of other people’s revelries in the furnace of health insurance. Driving along the main avenue, the five white-trimmed blue Alfettas of the cops had already come up against similar metaphors. For example, the other villas. They were almost all illegal. They rose two or three stories, taking their cues from the fake lawns littered with mountain bikes, yellow and red T-shirts signed with felt-tip pens by Bruno Conti or Falcao, half-empty champagne bottles. Every villa culminated in a terrace overflowing with ornamental plants, and two out of three had a pool. They were what’s called a slap in the face of poverty, but they stood out in the splendor of the summer light—the blinding white of the stucco against the blue of the sky—so as to make you think that a pardon had already been granted in the parliamentary wings of the Almighty.

  The first to notice the arrival of the law were the Saggese twins. But it’s also likely that the men in uniform, just getting out of their cars, managed to extract from the background music of the cicadas the unmistakable signs of a tennis match. Dunlop ball against synthetic string—squeak of sole on Mateco concrete—rubber against racket accompanied by the typical “huh!” with which athletes emphasize the heave of their chests—silence—net—curse. The tennis courts were confined to the southern part of the residential area, well hidden by the pines near the Appia Nuova, and on one of the two rectangles Cristiano and Stefano Saggese lived in voluntary exile. They shared thirty-two years, perfectly divided between them, in addition to a low forehead and a particular mixture of prudence and lack of imagination that, if I had been able at the time to play with words, I would certainly have called homozygous idiocy.

  Michele Saggese, the boys’ father, was the only one in the neighborhood who in his youth had frequented the halls of the university, the only one who used an accountant to pay his taxes, the only one who was seriously tormented by the thought that his children might hang out with those of the neighbors. That is, us. He lost sleep at night over it. Cristiano and Stefano, in turn, believed that a journey through the urethra of an individual convinced that government securities and the separation of garbage for recycling were the basis of civilization deserved to be repaid in the coin of obedience. As a result, they stayed clear of us. And, given that the southernmost reaches of the neighborhood gave us a sense of melancholy (we couldn’t bear the sober schematicism of the courts), the Saggese twins made tennis the St. Helena of those who have never passed through Waterloo. How many matches did they play thanks to us? Hours and hours of perfecting their technique, entire afternoons of following the ball. Every so often their father showed up too. He watched them with satisfaction, nursing the impossible dream of a Davis Cup win in doubles. But in general the only difficult finish line that losers manage to cross has to do with logic: They are capable of reaching excellent levels of mediocrity. In fact, at the time there was talk everywhere of Serena and Venus Williams. But of the Saggese twins at Wimbledon, only the intimation of a study vacation.

  Thus, when Stefano Saggese went to retrieve a ball that had ended up outside the fence, the scoreboard with which he mentally covered the distance that separated him from match point shattered in the face of a different sort of calculation. One, two, three, four, five police cars … He raised his head and shared with his clone the same conclusion that receivers of stolen goods come to before vanishing silently through one of the many service doors available to those who—in an immense kingdom of speculators, small-town whores, and drug addicts such as Rome was in the ’80s—appreciate a certain discretion along with the flow of cash.

  “Something is happening…” Stefano Saggese said.

  Since at a certain point the number of kids with no police record was not sufficient even for a bridge tournament, I never really understood the procedure. Ten cops surround a neoclassical-style villa full of expensive junk. While two or three approach the gate, two more take down the license number of the Ferrari, one maybe communicates with headquarters, but who is authorized to talk to the passersby? Whoever this nameless man is, his job is even more monotonous than that of the person playing the role of the herald in a Shakespearian tragedy. Two lines and exit: Usually passersby haven’t seen anything, and the cop has to let them go.

  But this time the script was twisted. The cop who was assigned to interview the passersby, and whose gaze up to that point had been drifting among high-cylinder still lifes, saw the sunny desert of the street disintegrate because of two figures in movement. Spontaneously they advanced toward him. Neither was more than five-six: red Lacoste shirt, blue shorts, each holding a Maxima Corrado Barazzutti racket. If you looked closely—the herald in uniform was tempted to squint—it was the same person.

  “Need help?” asked the optical illusion.

  It wasn’t curiosity that impelled the Saggese twins toward the police cars. They were not fans of adventure, and they would not have approached the Canditos’ house even if they had found out that a UFO had landed on it. Another force was pushing them, an impalpable feeling of rancor nursed for years, serve after serve after volley after serve, a grudge fueled by the hypnotic monotony of white stripes on a red background, a revenge that the cowardly little twins could satisfy only with the weapons of an informer.

  “Yes,” the policeman smiled. “Does the Candito family live here?”

  “This is their house,” one of the boys confirmed, coming dangerously close to the first orgasm of his life.

  Then love of pedantry overcame love of betrayal. Stefano Saggese felt compelled to add: “But Mr. and Mrs. Candito aren’t home. They’re on vacation in the Canaries.”

  “We aren’t looking for Mr. and Mrs. Candito,” the policeman explained. “We’re looking for Saverio, one of the kids. Do you know him?”

  Stefan
o Saggese turned pale, and from that moment he was unable to distinguish the explosion of joy from an abortive experience. His twin lowered his eyes and assumed the thoughtful expression of one who can never enjoy a victory. If it had been Pippo Candito, Saverio’s father, who in a few minutes was to come down the steps of the villa with handcuffs on his wrists, his face swollen with shame, the Saggese twins would have received living proof of that maxim which their father would never tire of repeating with stylized gravity, even if it had concerned a Pilgrim just off the Mayflower: the same maxim that the fruit of those loins believed to be confirmed when, shut in their room, they read comics whose every detail—including the name of whoever did the lettering—they grasped, except for the subtle ironic streak (“Crime doesn’t pay,” Dulls reflected, behind bars at the end of an episode of Alan Ford, only to be found, a few issues later, safe, relaxed and smiling, in a presidential suite surrounded by women in leopard-skin jackets). But the police wanted Saverio. Which, logically, should have made the Saggese twins even happier: Up to a certain age a sense of competitiveness emerges only between contemporaries. But the thought that someone their age, in fact someone who, along with five or six others, had been able to win for himself a disproportionate amount of chaos and diversion, had now used that same mysterious magnet to attract to the driveway of his own house five police cars—well, that was a very complicated thought to come to terms with: The Saggese twins felt the dizzy sensation of envying even the downfall of their bitterest enemy.

  “We know him,” Cristiano Saggese confirmed. “What do you want him for?” he added, his cheeks completely red.

  “Pushing heroin. Is this him?” The policeman showed them a small salmon-colored rectangle.

  The twins nodded. The cop asked if they had seen him in the past hour, hour and a half, and the two boys shook their heads no. At that point they were dismissed, and they vanished obediently into the haze, just as, probably rightly, they exit from this memoir as well. I don’t know what happened to them. Usually, small concentrations of rancor and servility condemned to burning defeat on the playing field of youth re-ascend the slope, with the passing of time, to discover a tenacity, a sense of struggle … they find themselves with the entire armamentarium needed for nursing what the MBAs call “ambition.” So I can imagine them in the role of financial consultants, as, in their office in Prati watched over by images of the Pope and fake Campbell’s soup can silk screens, they inundate a potential client with patter. Neither debilitating tumors nor fifteen months in jail for price-fixing: My only wish for them is that at some point during one of these informal encounters—in order to hook the wallet of their prey, the postgraduates cunningly offer some sort of anecdote—the potential client feels free to depart from the subject long enough to ask: “And how was your adolescence?”

  “Good, thanks,” one of the Saggeses would answer.

  Then he would go out to dinner at the Cavalieri Hilton, return home, and wake up in the middle of the night covered with sweat, believing that he still has in his ears the sounds of a hundred thousand tennis balls that won’t stop rebounding off the walls of an empty room.

  The plaster discus throwers were nothing. After having made vain use of the intercom and then the doorbell, the police went over the gate, slid a thin object very much like a credit card along the front door lock, and faced the semidarkness of a hall tiled in pink marble. One of them loosened the cord of a curtain. The spectacle that met their eyes outdid the murkiest fantasies of a prop man with an unlimited budget.

  The shutters let in thin streams of light that would be transformed into clouds of multicolored dust when they touched the peacock feathers that, grouped in bunches of ten, greeted the visitor, peeking out from the mouths of amphoras as tall as a standing greyhound. Not that real dogs were lacking: Ten examples of an eccentric dog lover’s passion in white porcelain, five on one side of the room, five on the other, exchanged aquamarine glances, thanks to large turquoise gems embedded at nose level. First Communions at the church of San Giovanni in Laterano and other sacraments were guaranteed remembrance in massive silver frames, just as an unintentional colonial tribute was given life on the ceiling (white tiger skin) and on one of the carpets (stuffed crocodile). It was as if two irreconcilable images had found a point of contact: The humor of a Barberini tormented by vice and bombast matched the happiness, the innocent exultation of joy, the expressive apex of one who, stuck until the day before among anonymous ragpickers, could say to himself, Now I am a rich man.

  The police looked around and split up. One to check the garden, one in the kitchen, four upstairs, the others to the basement.

  I spent a lot of time in that villa over the years. And its layout is still vivid to my eyes: I can remember perfectly the tables, the brocades, the big jukebox with Claudio Villa always in pole position. I can visualize every inch of those rooms and, wonder after wonder, despite all the time that has passed, I can, in lucky moments, touch the jugular, recalling, with great precision, the cardiac tumult of a pusher on the run. But I cannot enter into the minds of the enforcers of order. So, really, I couldn’t answer the following questions:

  What did policeman number 1 think when he turned his back on the veranda—two large palms arching over his head, gaze driven beyond the slides, the bushes, the swing, and onward, as far as the gladiolus that beautified a stone wall crowned by the opaque sparkle of shards of glass?

  How did policeman number 2 kill time, left alone in the kitchen among unknown appliances (many imported from America) for the entire duration of the search?

  What was the reaction of numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6, who, moving up to the second floor, found themselves facing a ten-million-lire Steinway whose only purpose was to be stroked by a dust cloth? Above all, what did numbers 5 and 6 feel—not those who searched the bedroom of the Candito spouses but the other two, the ones who entered a room with peach-colored wallpaper, a space saturated with the fruit-flavored oiliness of lip gloss and populated by life-size stuffed animals, necklaces, posters of Jennifer Beals in Flashdance in track suit and leg warmers? What did numbers 5 and 6 feel: the reproof that certain adults reserve for spoiled girls or, on the contrary, the hot, suffocating sensation of vice imprisoned in a cotton camisole, the violent ambiguity of bitter fruits and little girls that lead men to ask forgiveness for crimes that we might all be driven to commit? Silvia Candito, sixteen years old in 1987, now married with two children: one of the few to be saved.

  What was to be found was found by policemen numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10. They signaled quickly to one another and took the stairs that led to the basement. It was one big space, without dividing walls, set up as a game room: billiard table, jukebox, strobe light, a long stone bench that stretched around the entire perimeter of the room. Two boys were squatting under the billiard table. Their calves had been straining for who knows how long, their bottoms a few inches from the floor. Both with arms around their knees.

  “Saverio Candito,” said one of the policemen.

  The boy hugged his knees tighter behind the reddish down of his forearms and gave his notorious look of surrender. If he had stood up it would have been immediately obvious that he was extremely short for a seventeen-year-old. He had a stocky body, muscular arms and shoulders, a small belt of blubber around his hips, that copper-colored hair, curly, very short. When he was in trouble he fixed his adversaries with a harsh look of capitulation, the sort of look that a boxer might be facing who has dominated the entire match and who now, in the last round, wants to satisfy his desire for a knockout: a look that didn’t say, simply, I’m yours. It said: I’m in deep shit, and if you want me you’ll have to come in and get me.

  But the cop couldn’t be intimidated by this boy’s code, whose nuances he barely grasped. He reformulated the question.

  “Saverio Candito. That’s you, right?”

  “No,” said Saverio.

  They were used to more complex situations. This type of emergency was kids’ stuff, you could handle it by
following the rules in the manual, step by step. Lately, they had been dealing with men who cursed saints and madonnas while with one hand they grabbed another man by the hair and with the free hand shoved a gun in the guy’s mouth. Thus, a second policeman decided that he could make a little scene. He raised a hand toward his colleagues, as if to say, Leave it to me, now let’s have some fun. So he took a salmon-colored, plastic-covered rectangle and threw it in the boy’s face without saying a word.

  Saverio caught it. There he found his name and surname and date of birth and all the rest, and a photo from two years earlier in which he was smiling with half-closed eyes. He wondered how the police could possibly have his ID. For an instant he entertained the completely absurd hypothesis of a forgery. Then he realized that he had simply lost it in the wrong place. He emerged from under the billiard table, giving himself up to the cops.

  At that point the second boy also came out. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt with blue writing in swirling rodeo-type letters: Country by the Grace of God.

  “Don’t tell my parents,” Danilo said with a sad smile.

  “The third one’s missing” was policeman number 7 or 8’s sole response.

  The two boys, who were now standing with their heads down, and practically on the point of holding each other by the hand, said nothing.

  “There were three of you,” the man explained. “We know, they saw you. Come on, where’s the other boy?”

  Maybe at this point the two kids felt challenged. Something was rekindled in their eyes. They were coming from two years of confrontations that were like jumping into rings of fire, and that invitation to betrayal was like an injection of hope. They continued to say nothing, but suddenly, in their looks, things seemed okay in this world.

  “Listen,” said the man, and from his tone it sounded like the standard speech in which one says how you should and shouldn’t behave to avoid compromising an already very delicate situation. But one of his colleagues didn’t let him get started.