Incapable of moving. Incapable of making a decision. Incapable of speaking. Sabrina rummaged through her handbag and pulled out her cell phone.
“We need to call an ambulance!” said Sabrina.
A hint of understanding finally ignited in the Honorable Malgradi’s mind: I’m fucked! He collapsed onto the bed, next to the foreigner, who was growing increasingly ashen and breathless. As the languid enchantment of the cocaine subsided and the hysterical lucidity of the amphetamine began to gallop, the inevitable consequences flicked before his eyes in rapid sequence.
Donna Fabiana, wife and mother, devout member of the Oblate Daughters of the Virgin Mary. Gone.
His own position as national secretary of the party, fanatically committed to the defense of the Italian family against the twin blights of gay marriage and abortion. Gone.
His angry disappointed voters from the district of the Ionian coast of Calabria.
All gone. Epic scandal. Poverty. Prison.
The Lithuanian girl was gasping and panting, her mouth filling with a yellowish foam, her fists clenching and unclenching as she labored to suck in one last desperate puff of air.
Malgradi snatched the cell phone out of Sabrina’s hands.
“You’re not calling shit, you get me? Get out of here! Jativínni! Vui cca nun siti mai vinuti! Neither of you were ever here! I never met you!”
“Jesus Christ, she’s dying! We have to call for help!”
“That’s her problem! Fuck it, I’m getting out of here, now!” shouted Malgradi, as he started desperately flailing around in search of clothing.
Sabrina, suddenly chilly, eyeing him like a vulture, said: “Of course you are; after all, no one saw you come up here with us.”
Hotel La Chiocciola, a charming little hideaway. They should have burned it down years ago, damn them and the families that had them! And damn you, he thought. Damn the dick he used for brains, he should have put it on a chain, tied it up in a triple knot: il triplo nodo t’avía ’a fari! Damn fucking Vicky, and the rest of her ilk, Italy’s been too soft on these immigrants for far too long now, give them an inch and they’ll take the whole damned mile and then some. He was fucked, he knew it. Fucked!
Finally, with one last rattle, the poor miserable girl threw up a chunk of puke, and then fell silent.
“She’s dead!” Sabrina whispered softly.
She closed her friend’s eyes and shot Malgradi a glare blazing with disgust, nausea, and contempt.
The Honorable Malgradi, however, was miles away. From deep in his heart a memory from his earliest childhood back in Calabria had begun to sprout. What was it his grandfather, Nonno Alcide, used to say when they went fishing off the coast of Le Castella? That’s right: prega, prega, c’arriva ’u pisci, picchí è proprio quando non sai che pesci pigliare che devi pregare. “Pray, pray for fish, because it’s precisely when you’re at loose ends that you need to pray.” And so Malgradi fell to his knees, put both hands together, and called upon the Almighty, that His blessed hand might be laid upon His humble servant, “I’ll retire to a monastery, o Lord, I’ll take religious vows, just save me from this scandal, You who can work Your will as You please, I beg you, I . . . ”
“That’s right, on your knees and pray. Look, here comes your guardian angel now, on a flying carpet.”
Ah, now the whore was having her say. And she even dared to insult him. On what grounds? You bring me this encephalitic hooker who probably carries all kinds of diseases, and still you lecture me?
An uncontrollable fury took hold of the Honorable Malgradi. He stood up, lunged at Sabrina, and knocked her to the floor with one vicious straight-armed smack.
“Sure, sure, bravo,” she replied, unruffled, rubbing her cheek with one hand. “Now what are you going to do? Kill me too? So then you’d have two corpses to get rid of, not just one?”
“Oh, what the fuck do you want from me now? Do you have any good ideas, you two-bit whore?”
Sabrina picked up her cell phone and dialed a number.
“Spadino? I could use some help here.”
Thirty minutes later, a young man, about twenty-two, knocked at the door. He was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a black T-shirt. He was short, pockmarked, and ugly as unsecured debt.
Sabrina let him in and pointed to the bed.
It only took the young man a quick glance around the hotel room to understand he’d just hit the jackpot. The corpse, Sabrina looking depressed and utterly disgusted, the guy dripping sweat and wringing his hands . . . Yes, this was his shot at the big time. Better than anything he’d dared to dream of when the call came in from Sabrina.
“If you could help us resolve this rather . . . unseemly . . . situation . . . ”
The high muckety-muck came over, with the smile he wore for election-day victory speeches and his hands shaking as if he was on the verge of a panic attack. Let’s just hope he doesn’t start wailing like a two-year-old.
“Well?”
“I . . . you see . . . Sabrina, here, has told me so many good things about you, sir . . . ”
“She’s told me the same about you, as far as that goes,” Spadino replied with a snicker.
The Honorable Malgradi shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out a fat wallet.
“If you would be so good as to give me a little assistance . . . ”
By that point, he just didn’t know what to say. More importantly, how to put it. The young man amused himself by leaving the man to dangle for a while, then he nodded and lit a cigarette.
“Okay, let me get this straight. You want me to get rid of one dead whore . . . And that’s something I can take care of.”
A broad smile of relief spread across the Honorable Malgradi’s features.
“Naturally!” he said, opening the wallet. “I was thinking that for your trouble . . . ”
“Exactly how much you were thinking, just out of curiosity?”
The Honorable Malgradi handed him a wad of bills.
“That must be . . . ”
“We can count it later,” the young man reassured him, pocketing the wad of bills with rapacious haste.
Malgradi fell back on the smile he reserved for his most prestigious counterparts when a negotiation had culminated in a mutually satisfactory deal.
“I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me today, Signor . . . ”
“Call me Spadino. And as for saying thank you . . . you’ll have all the time in the world, later! Right now, get the hell out of here.”
Malgradi backed away toward the door, muttering a stream of boilerplate terms of gratitude.
“It seems to me that your boyfriend is quite the asshole,” Spadino commented, once the coast was clear.
“You can’t begin to imagine how much of one.”
“Give me a hand getting this poor girl dressed, Sabri’.”
With a sigh, the two of them got to work.
The plan was to dump her in a place Spadino knew well. A safe place. So the important thing now was to get her out of the hotel without letting La Chiocciola’s desk clerk, maids, or any chance passing strangers suspect that the girl was dead. But even fully dressed and liberally doused with perfume—the night was hot, and she was already starting to emit a faintly unpleasant odor—there was something unmistakably corpse-like about the Lithuanian girl. So Spadino ordered Sabrina to put some makeup on her, and she contributed the idea of putting on the mirrored Tom Ford sunglasses she wore whenever, after a long night out, she had to pull an unexpected quickie. Even if the effect was less than spectacular, it would work. All they had to do was move the girl fifty, maybe sixty feet, and if they were lucky, everything would work out fine.
They got her to her feet, each supporting her from the side. Jesus, she was heavy, God rest her soul! Moving her was an unwieldy process, and it was obvious she wasn’t walkin
g, that the two of them were dragging her.
“This is all we can do,” said Spadino. “We’ll tell the desk clerk that she’s drunk. We can give him a hundred euros, make it clear to him that it’s in his interest to look the other way.”
His thinking was impeccable.
They headed out the door.
The fifth floor corridor was deserted. The elevator came promptly. Smooth as silk, they strode briskly out into the lobby. Spadino asked the desk clerk to hold the heavy revolving door open for him, which the man happily did with a meek smile. Sabrina slipped him a couple of hundred-euro bills.
Once the odd little trio had trundled off down the street, the desk clerk went back to his chair behind the counter, set aside the Corriere dello Sport that he read religiously every day to make himself feel a little more Roman and, when necessary—depending on the guest’s loyalties—more of an A. S. Roma fan or an S. S. Lazio fan, and did some thinking. His name was Kerion Kemani, he was thirty-five years old, he came from Albania, and a nagging doubt was bothering him. He owed everything he had to the Honorable Malgradi: his job, for one thing, and his Italian citizenship, which he was expecting to receive any day now. But just how far should he take it with the gratitude? Before he’d decided to stick to the straight and narrow, Kerion had had his own short time on the street. Come to think of it, it wasn’t as if the Italians had given him much of an option. He’d landed in Bari with the first wave of immigrants, back in 1991. He was little more than a child when he’d found himself jammed with a small army of illegal immigrants in a soccer stadium that soon turned into a cage full of savage beasts. To pay for their passage across the Adriatic, his father had sold everything they owned: the house, the fields, the few heads of livestock that he’d managed to save from the greed of the Communist regime. In the Bari stadium, the Vlorë Mafia had taken care of the rest: his sister had become a streetwalker and he’d gotten busy working as a debt collector. What that meant was spending his days terrorizing husbands and fathers, breaking a leg or an arm every once in a while, beating down unruly whores. That kind of thing. After that, things had changed of course, but there are some memories that never fade. And if his street smarts meant anything, well, then the girl with the oversized sunglasses on hadn’t really been drunk at all.
She’d been dead.
That said, what to do next?
All right, let’s think this through.
Whatever it was that happened in the Anna Magnani Suite, Malgradi was in it up to his neck. Which meant what for him, Kerion?
After all, the generosity that the Honorable Malgradi had shown him had hardly been offered free and clear. Malgradi was helping him get ahead in Italy, but in exchange Kerion guaranteed absolute discretion concerning the man’s turbulent sex life. Malgradi was never registered at the hotel, no inconvenient documentation was ever sent to police headquarters, no requests for IDs, and moreover, all Kerion’s compatriots who managed to obtain their long-sought Italian citizenship—at least a thousand to date—were obliged to vote for him.
So really, more than generosity, this was a pact. And everyone knows that pacts don’t last forever. Or if they do, their terms can always be renegotiated.
“Now it’s my turn, Honorable Malgradi.”
And so it was that Kerion Kemani, Albanian night porter and would-be Italian citizen, went upstairs to the Anna Magnani Suite, took possession of a pillowcase stained with a foul-smelling substance that he thought better of investigating in any detail, and a piece of aluminum foil with residues of a white powder. Then he pulled out his cell phone and took a series of photographs of the scene of the crime. Later, in the two-room apartment he’d been sharing recently with his sister in Pigneto, who had recently been promoted from a streetwalker to the caregiver of an elderly lady in a wheelchair, he wrote down a short account of what had happened, and finally turned in for the night.
When the time was right, all these things would come in handy.
Spadino and Sabrina dumped the corpse in the nature reserve of Marcigliana, just a few miles short of Monterotondo Scalo. Spadino identified a small ravine, together they hauled the Lithuanian girl out of the car and laid her to rest on a comfy bed of leaves and dry sticks.
“Rest in peace, amen,” Spadino commented, and rolled himself a cigarette.
“Now, would you please take me back to Rome?”
“Oh, relax, Sabri’, look at what a beautiful starry night it is. We’re just getting started here. It strikes me that this little prank is going to cost your friend the Honorable M.P. a nice tidy stack of euros.”
“I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Who even invited you in? In fact: you’ve never even met me, got it?”
“You be careful: Malgradi is a dangerous character.”
“Who? Him?”
“He’s got powerful friends, Spadi’, don’t underestimate him.”
“Don’t talk bullshit! Of the two of us, I’m the one you should be scared of, beautiful! Now, quit your sobbing, eh? What’s done is done.”
“Spadino, I want to change my life.”
“Too bad for you,” he snickered bitterly flicking away his cigarette butt. “You want to know something? All this activity has got me horny as hell.”
“Please, let’s just go back to Rome, all right?”
“You want a ride, you pay your fare, sweetheart,” he replied brusquely, unzipping his fly.
Sabrina got busy paying her fare.
Meanwhile, all around them, silent invisible shadows began to circle, attracted by the rank odor. Feral dogs.
II
Spadino phoned the chamber of deputies and asked to speak to Malgradi. They put him through to a courteous secretary.
“The Honorable is at the foundation.”
“And just where would I find this foundation?”
“Excuse me?”
“Could you give me the foundation’s address?”
“It’s on Largo dei Lombardi. Do you know where the old headquarters of the Italian Socialist Party were?”
Spadino, who’d never heard of whatever it was she’d just said, but assumed it had something to do with socializing, took a few moments to realize that the place must be next to the shop where, when business was good, he went to buy sharp new shoes.
He rode over on his scooter, and parked it haphazardly next to a no parking sign.
Six large smoked plate-glass windows overlooking the street formed an L that embraced the piazza and one side of Via del Corso, giving no hint to the kind of humanity and life that might be moving around inside save for the occasional fleeting passage of shadows. The front door, made of impact-resistant glass, opened automatically when electric eyes detected movement, and was surmounted by a tricolor cockade in painted aluminum. A plaque proclaimed: “Back On Your Feet, Rome.” Why, when exactly did Rome fall? And who is supposed to get Rome back on her feet, Malgradi? Oh, please!
The two bouncers who were guarding the entrance were well-known faces: bodybuilders from Ostia who’d started out working in nightclubs, when Spadino was selling hash around schools. They let him through with a nod of greeting.
A smiling, fluffy brunette walked to greet him.
“Buongiorno. Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the Honorable.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“We’re old friends.”
“Could I have your name, then?”
“I brought him back something that he forgot at La Chiocciola the other night,” said Spadino, touching his backpack.
“You’re going to have to wait, I’m afraid. The Honorable, this morning, is going from one meeting to the next.”
“I don’t have anything better to do. I’ll wait.”
“Then if you’d care to follow me, I’ll see you to our Italia lounge . . . ”
&nbs
p; “Gladly.”
Spadino allowed himself to be led down a short blind hallway with an epoxy resin-and-cement floor, and from there into a large rectangular space, very spacious but windowless. Down the wood- and slate-lined walls trickled rivulets of water that were gathered in steel drain runnels illuminated by chilly spotlights sunken into the floor. Well, you tell me, Spadino said to himself, my grandfather, god rest his soul, was right: the best way to make money in this world is politics.
In the center of the room, surrounded by a hemicycle of black-leather Chesterfield sofas, to one side of a crystal-topped table with cylindrical legs that were replicas of Trajan’s Column, sat a haggard-faced puny guy in a navy-blue pinstriped suit, talking to another man who kept interrupting him and addressing him as “counselor.” The two men seemed to be in the midst of a discussion that was as vigorous as it was sensitive.
“This is our Roman political coordinator,” explained the fluffy brunette, “Counselor Mauro Lotorchio. If you’d like to speak with him in the meantime . . . ”
“Why don’t I just get myself an espresso instead.”
The brunette pointed him to the short end of the lounge. A steel and glass counter where a highly buffed chrome-plated vintage espresso machine enjoyed pride of place. Leaning against the counter were two cute blondes, around twenty, in black tops, white stretch pants, and stiletto heels.
“Our volunteers are at your service,” she said brusquely, with a note of resentment in her voice, then turned and disappeared.
Spadino headed over to the coffee machine and didn’t even have to ask. The hand of one of the two volunteers, with a handful of light-blue enameled nails, pushed an espresso in his direction.
“So do you seriously work here for free?”
“The Honorable says that politics is a form of service. A passion. Not a job.”
“Oh, really? Is that what the Honorable says? And what do you eat for dinner?”
“The Honorable always takes me out to dinner, or else one of his coworkers does.”
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