“Sounds about right.”
Spadino turned his gaze toward Lotorchio and the man with whom he’d gone back to arguing. Even though the two of them were doing their best to keep their voices low, he was able to overhear the conversation. The guy was querously demanding an apartment. Lotorchio was offering, but nothing was good enough for the other guy. There was a problem with all of them. How the fuck many apartments did this guy have to offer? And who did they belong to? Were they all Malgradi’s?
The first espresso was followed by a second, then a third. Time passed and there wasn’t the slightest sign of Malgradi. Spadino was starting to see red. Lotorchio and his interlocutor had finally come to an understanding, and shook hands. The other guy left. A uniformed general of city constables made his entrance. He spotted Lotorchio and strode toward him, waving a stack of papers in the air.
“My dear counselor! I’ve brought you the handicapped stickers that the Honorable asked for.”
Well, what do you know about that! Disgusted, Spadino was about to light a cigarette, in open defiance of the NO SMOKING signs that wallpapered the room, when Malgradi’s voice broke into the conversation between Lotorchio and the general of city constables. The Honorable was strolling arm in arm with a short, corpulent fellow dressed in a shamrock-green three-piece suit with a pink shirt and a dark brown tie. They seemed to be engaged in the tail-end of the discussion that had made him cool his heels in this waiting room for the past hour.
“So you have a clear idea of what the problem is, Your Honor? This whole problem with hiring for shops is turning into a nightmare. Are you telling me that I can’t kick a shop clerk out into the street if there aren’t any customers? Where are we, in North Korea? I need employees if I’m making money. If not, out you go, scat. Home with you. Forget about a severance package, reimbursement for unused vacation time.”
“You don’t have to persuade me. I presented an amendment that we’ll debate with the upcoming budget bill. We need to free our country from the dictatorship of the trade unions. Rights, entitlements . . . All the left ever wants to do is blare out those two words. What about duties? What about responsibilities? What ever became of them?”
“Then can I reassure the association? I have your word?”
“Malgradi is only one vote.”
“And the association has many votes.”
Everyone laughed heartily.
Until Malgradi saw him. Spadino. The guy from La Chiocciola. He went over to him and greeted him with a quaver in his voice, and it was impossible to say whether it was a quaver of rage or terror.
“What are you doing here?”
“Your Honor!” Spadino smiled.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he whispered into Spadino’s ear, trying to steer him toward the foundation’s front entrance with one hand on his shoulder.
Spadino planted his legs wide and braced against the side of the hallway. He grabbed his backpack with both hands and turned menacing.
“Rule number one: from now on, we lose the formality and are on a first-name basis. Like all good friends. Rule number two: favors get repaid. And that means that from today forward, you buy the shit from me. And not from those assholes from Ostia out front who are guarding your ass.”
“What shit?”
“So, you really don’t want to understand! Here, take this backpack, it’s got your colognes and perfumes. Let’s just say that you and your girlfriends can snort lines with this for a week. And let’s say that that makes five thousand. You can give it to me next time, if you don’t have the cash right now.”
“And what if I called the police?”
“Why don’t you just call the constable over there? He’s handier.”
Spadino pushed Malgradi away with a light shove of his right hand against the Honorable’s sternum. And as he headed off toward the door he stopped one last time.
“I’ll call you. You get the money ready. Let’s start with five thousand a week. Then, if you decide to throw a party, I can get plenty of shit. It’ll cost a little extra, but it’s the best. Ah, love and kisses from our mutual friend. You remember Sabrina, don’t you?”
Malgradi watched Spadino go until he saw him exit the building and walk out onto Largo dei Lombardi. In the throes of a flush of body heat, he got on his cell phone.
The man they called Number Eight answered on the third ring. Malgradi skipped the conventional greetings. His voice was shaking, on the verge of full hysteria.
“Do you . . . Do you know a certain Spadino?”
“Of course I know him. He’s from Cinecittà. Why?”
“Look, it’s simply intolerable. The man showed up here at the foundation. He started blathering on in front of everyone that you and I . . . ahem, yes, that is . . . that certain things from now on will go through him and him alone.”
“And just how did he wind up there, this Spadino? What does he have to do with a person like you?”
“In fact, as I was telling you . . . It’s inconceivable. He says that he got my name from a friend of his, some girl . . . But I tell you, are we playing games here? In fact, you see, I was hoping you might give me some advice. Because, you see, I’d rather not be bothered again. This is pure rabble, the kind of scum that might talk out of turn.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it, Your Honor. As far as you’re concerned, it’s already taken care of.”
“You’re simply exquisite. Really. Exquisite as always.”
III
Number Eight climbed into his black V8 Hummer and checked the time. One thirty. He was in time for his appointment with Spadino. At the usual place. He ran his left hand over his bald head until he located the only strip of hair, an inch tall, that was left on his head, designing on the nape of his neck a perfect Number Eight in high relief.
Number Eight. Fuck, what a fantastic name.
It had started out as a joke when he was just a kid in Ostia, poolsharking in halls from Levante to Ponente. Back when they still called him Cesare, the name his father had given him. There had never been any need for the surname—Adami. Everyone knew his surname and everyone carefully avoided uttering it. The nickname sprang out of the fact that before every game of pool, before the break, he’d developed the habit of lifting one ball off the green felt table—the eight ball, only and always that one—and rolling it around on his prematurely bald noggin.
Then it had become a serious matter. Deadly serious. He had become a serious person. More serious than anyone else around.
“Number Eight,” period. The boss of Ponente at the age of just thirty-five.
There were a few pieces of shit who still claimed that he deserved none of the credit. Thirty years ago, Libano had made him an orphan. He still remembered the day that, on the beach of Lega Navale, they’d hauled his father up in a net, half-eaten by grey mullets and swollen to the size of a whale. People said that it if hadn’t been for Uncle Nino, there’d be nothing left in Ostia of him and his family, not even the stench. Sure, Nino and Libano had come to an understanding and the Adamis had even outlived the gang. Libano was dead. Dandi was dead. Meanwhile, Uncle Nino’s hair had turned white, and in the absence of rivals, he’d remained the sole boss on the coastline. Coke, hashish, heroin. “Everyone needs to come under uncle’s umbrella.” Neapolitans, Sicilians, Calabrians. Then—since things have to be done the right way—the family had expanded. Uncle Nino had raised another orphan a few years younger than him: Denis. He was the eldest son of the Sale clan, an ancient family in Ponente, one of the first families to be deported to Nuova Ostia from the borgatas of Rome, a deranged psychotic. At age sixteen he’d used a Bic ballpoint pen to carve open the face of his high school teacher who had dared to remind him in class that his family had Gypsy origins.
Denis had married a descendant of the Anacletis, the family that controlled Eastern Rome. A marriage that ha
dn’t lasted long, given that the poor young thing had died when her Mercedes SLK slammed into a pine tree on Via Cristoforo Colombo.
May her soul rest in peace!
In any case, Adamis, Sales, Anacletis—that ain’t chicken feed. Uncle Nino’s masterpiece. Three families with half of Rome in their pocket. From east to west. Appio, Tuscolano, Cinecittà, Quadraro, Mandrione, and Casilino to the east. EUR, Axa, Infernetto, Casalpalocco, and Ostia to the west. Seventeen miles of high-speed beltway that looked like the crown of a queen. Of course, Uncle hadn’t been able to fully relish his triumph. He’d been in the clink five years now. Criminal conspiracy and narcotics trafficking. But he had nothing to worry about. He could take care of things: he, Number Eight.
He was the boss, at this point. Which meant Spadino was out of business.
Their rendezvous was fifteen minutes away, at most. The Hummer zipped along, old Ostia and the huge parking lots of the Extreme multiplex, one of Uncle Nino’s first undertakings, streaming past on the right. He passed the turnoff for the port of Fiumicino where you caught the ferry for Sardinia. At the roundabout for Leonardo da Vinci airport, after the Shell station, he made a right turn and continued along the secondary road that ran along the R1 runway.
The pine trees of Coccia di Morto rose up before him like the backdrop of a theater. Darkness behind him. Darkness ahead of him. Only the little red lights of the airstrip, beyond the hurricane fences surrounding the airport, gave him any indication of where he was. His father had first introduced him to this place when he was a boy. All things considered, the only innocent memory that he still cherished. They’d go down there together at sundown with a modified transistor radio and tune into the frequencies of the control tower. They’d eavesdrop on the conversations between the tower and the airplanes as they took off and landed. They could find out who was arriving and from where and who was leaving and where they were headed. The good old days. Then Libano had whacked Papa, and the only use for low frequencies he’d had after that was to eavesdrop on the cops.
He slammed on the brakes. Spadino’s Smart Car was parked with the headlights off in the little clearing a couple of hundred yards into the pine grove, right where the road curved down toward the sea. He pulled over. He got out of the Hummer and went over on foot. Spadino had remained behind the wheel, with the window rolled down. Number Eight leaned over, his big hands braced against the roof of the Smart Car.
“Hey Spadino, they tell me your business is going great, but I see that you’re still driving the same piece of shit car.”
“I don’t have any time to waste. Especially not with you. What do you want?”
“You don’t know what I want? But you’re a smart boy, Spadi’. How does that commandment go? Thou shalt not covet . . . ”
“Thy neighbor’s wife. But you’re not here to talk about wives. I know that the Honorable came running to you with his sob story. I’ve already talked with your people. And now I’m going to tell you what I told them: you and me have nothing to talk about. Malgradi belongs to me, now. And if you want to know why, just ask that chickenshit yourself, ’cause I bet he was afraid to tell you.”
“Then why don’t you explain it all to me?”
“A whore died on him, in his bed. So I took care of the cleanup. Does that sound like enough, in terms of justification? I earned him, got it? And now he belongs to me.”
It was a matter of seconds. Number Eight lifted his right hand off the roof of the Smart Car and darted it in through the car window, grabbing Spadino by the hair on the back of his head. He didn’t even sense a great deal of resistance. Up and down. Up and down. He smashed Spadino’s face against the steering wheel until he’d shattered it. Then he hauled the body out of the car.
“Well look at what a nice big watermelon we’ve just cut open.”
He dragged him over to a pine tree. And then started in on him again. Up and down. Up and down. Pounding that head, which was basically porridge now, against the tree trunk.
It had been five minutes, at most. He stared at runway R1. He took a deep breath of the night air that smacked of salt water and aviation fuel. He went back to the Hummer and enjoyed a nice big snort of coke. The blast hit his brain. Only then did he pop the trunk. He went around and pulled out a two-gallon gas can.
“Be prepared. Never go anywhere without some spare gas.”
Then he put Spadino back behind the wheel, doused the whole car with gas, and set it ablaze. He threw his car quickly into reverse as the Smart Car and its driver went up in a ball of flame.
“Have a good trip, Spadi’. And you were right. You and me have nothing to talk about.”
IV
Standing motionless on the platform of track 1 at the Tiburtina station, Lieutenant Colonel Marco Malatesta of the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Group crushed the butt of his umpteenth cigarette under the sole of his green sneakers. He’d taken command of the anticrime section barely two weeks ago, and two weeks ago he’d also started smoking his Camel Lights again, tossing into the wind three full years of hard-won abstinence from tobacco. He slowly massaged his right temple with small, circular movements. The age-old scar was pulsing furiously. It always happened, whenever action was imminent.
Marco plunged his hands into the deep pockets of his heavy motorcycle jacket, which were useful for concealing his Beretta 92 FS. He grabbed his smartphone. He fooled around on the display until he found what he was looking for. The picture lit up, full screen.
Gennaro Sapone.
A nondescript face. He looked like an ordinary bank clerk. He was one of the most dangerous professional killers in Scampia. The last poor wretch he’d sent to meet his maker had been dispatched with a single shot to the back of the head, but it had been a case of mistaken identity: a laborer coming home, instead of a local mob boss. From that day forward, Sapone had vanished. The neighborhood locals were looking for Sapone. The government was looking for Sapone. Which meant he, Marco, was looking for Sapone. And now, if the tip turned out to be right, Sapone’s run from the law was about to end. On that platform.
This was the first real operation since Emanuele Thierry de Roche, the commanding general of the Special Ops, had summoned him back to headquarters, returning him to his beloved Rome after eleven vagabond years in the various diplomatic missions of the MSU, the Multinational Specialized Unit. They’d known each other for a lifetime, he and Thierry. And Marco, who owed so very much—perhaps everything—to Emanuele, still hadn’t been able to figure out why they’d become friends, the two of them, so very different. Thierry was tall, slender, and formal, the last living descendant of Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, many times great-grandnephew of Napoleon the Great, just think. And Marco. Who would remain for the rest of his life nothing more than a hoodlum from Talenti. Perhaps it was because they both felt the same way about it: Rome needed to be saved. Especially from itself.
Malatesta looked at his watch and the arrivals board. Eleven o’clock at night. Another five minutes and the interregional from Naples would be delivering that butcher on the run to him. Out of the corner of his eye he checked the track. A fake conductor at the head of the platform. A janitor at the foot of it. And in the middle, a cop disguised as a vendor, rummaging in the beverage baskets. Thank God, there were no other human beings to complicate matters.
The headlights of the arriving locomotive pierced the darkness without warning, while the loudspeaker warned the passengers to stay behind the yellow line. Malatesta once again slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket, slipped the safety off, and got a firm grip on the butt of his handgun.
The train came screeching to a halt. The doors swung open the length of the cars, and an overheated, variegated humanity burst out of those doors. Too many people.
Where’s Sapone?
Malatesta knew that sensation very well. The adrenaline was starting to pump. But there was no sign of the killer.
>
To hell with him, he thought with a surge of anger, turning his back on the cars and running his gaze over the entrance to the escalators.
And that was when Sapone got off the train.
The two shots fired into the air from the .38 that the Neapolitan was clutching in his right hand, coming just seconds before the screams of a young mother, left no room for doubt. The animal had grabbed her little girl out of the woman’s arms. Sapone had spotted them.
Malatesta’s men took shelter. Aiming their regulation weapons they demanded a surrender that was never going to happen.
“Carabinieri! Carabinieri! Drop your weapon!”
Sapone aimed his pistol at the head of his little hostage.
“Come on, then, you chickenshit cop. Come on, if you’ve got the balls!”
The little girl was crying. The mother was screaming. The other passengers were hastening to get away. A stalemate.
“I want a car!” the Camorrista shouted. “Otherwise I’ll carve this kid’s eyes out of her head!”
Orders, in this situation, were clear and binding. De-escalate the situation. Avoid harm to civilians at all costs.
The Carabinieri lowered their weapons.
Marco shook his head.
There are things that have to be done, and that’s that.
He started moving slowly toward Sapone; he was no more than fifty steps away from him. He was perfectly balanced, his right arm was extended the length of his body, clutching his Beretta. His eyes were drilling into the murderer’s face, because he’d long since learned that if you want to understand when a man’s about to kill, it’s deep in his eyes that you need to delve.
“Don’t you move! Don’t you move, fucker! I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you and the girl . . . I’ll kill yo-o-ou!”
The closer Malatesta got, the stronger the whiff of sweat and fear that came off of Sapone.
“I’ll kill you, you piece of shit Carabiniere . . . I’ll kill yo-o-ou! I’ll kill this girl!”
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