Suburra

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Suburra Page 5

by Giancarlo De Cataldo


  “Colonel, be careful!” one of his men shouted from behind him. He didn’t answer.

  He stopped at a distance of no more than five yards, forcing himself not to lock eyes with the little girl. He knew that he wasn’t going to waste a lot of breath on this. The words were going to be good for just one thing: to gain a few fractions of a second.

  “Sapone, it’s over!”

  “There are two possibilities, you piece of shit Carabiniere. Either I kill you or I kill the little girl!” he said, with the wide eyes of a cokehead.

  And those were the last words the Neapolitan uttered.

  Malatesta’s right arm shot up perpendicular to his body as if it was spring-loaded. He fired without taking aim. The bullet shattered Sapone’s hand. The pistol flew away and Sapone collapsed to the ground. Marco rushed over to the little girl. He threw his arms around her and dried her eyes. He whispered gently to her to calm the tremors that were shaking her body.

  “It’s all over now. It’s all over . . . ”

  The mother yanked her little girl out of his hands. She shouted: “You’re a madman!”

  She stared at him with blank eyes, while Marco lowered his gaze. There was nothing to explain. Sapone would have killed the little girl. That was the simple truth.

  There was bound to be no end of controversy, certainly. And there would almost certainly be disciplinary measures. And, as always, Marco would continue straight on his way.

  He turned his back on the woman to focus on the Camorrista whose wound his men were treating.

  “Three possibilities. There were three possibilities, you piece of shit. And you got the third.”

  He was still explaining how things had gone to the men from RIS, the forensics division, when, a couple of hours later, the call came in from Thierry on his cell phone.

  “Pine forest in flames. Smart Car burnt. Corpse charred. Go and report.”

  Marco went to get his motorcycle, a white Triumph Bonneville 800, in the square outside the Tiburtina train station. He angled gently through the last few curves on the crosstown highway, roared through a deserted Porta Maggiore lit by the neon suns of the porchetta vendor’s food truck, and in a rosary of blinking yellow traffic lights, he went past St. John Lateran, took Via dell’Amba Aradam, Piazzale Numa Pompilio, and rode past the arches of the Baths of Caracalla. He savored the shiver that the five or six degree drop in temperature of a summer dawn could bring as he headed west, along Via Cristoforo Colombo and the short section of highway from Rome to Fiumicino. As he roared up the Rampa delle Tre Fontane, he shot a fleeting glance at the rusted ferris wheel of the Luna Park, a monument to his childhood and to a time that was there, frozen, as if that city hadn’t known how to progress past its own ruins, but only to stack one set of ruins atop another.

  With the back of his glove, Malatesta cleaned the bloody ooze of mosquitos and gnats off his visor, a result of the off-ramp to Tor di Valle. Someone had decided to build Rome’s new soccer stadium there. Who can say whether that was a good idea. He slowed down when he drew even with the Magliana neighborhood. There had been a time when that quarter, built below the level of the river by some genius of urban planning, was known as open territory under the control of organized crime. Maybe its inhabitants had gotten sick and tired of such a dark and, nowadays, unjustified reputation. And he wondered with a half-smile what they thought of the idea that had been circulating for a while now: to build a cable car to connect Magliana to EUR. A cable car. And why not a spa, and ski slopes with man-made snow, as long as they were at it?

  He knew the scene of the crime like he knew his own pockets. His father used to take him to Coccia di Morto when he was a kid. In the afternoons, when he left the offices of the ministry, outside Rome, at EUR. He’d take him there to see the airplanes. He’d made no secret of his dream that one day Marco would captain one of those aircraft. Poor Papa! Marco had put him through so much shit. He’d hated his father. He’d ruined him. And only long after it was too late had he realized how unfair he’d been to him. He’d been a real bastard.

  The thing that told him he’d arrived was the stench. The lime-encrusted wreckage of the Smart Car was floating on a murky carpet of mud, water, and fire-extinguishing foam that hadn’t yet congealed.

  He braked the motorcycle to a halt a hundred yards or so from the crime scene tape that isolated the perimeter of the blaze. He tilted it on its side kickstand. He took off his helmet and slowly strapped it to the motorcycle seat with the cargo net. He stuck his gloves into one of the two leather saddlebags. He bunched up his jeans around the thigh, to diffuse the heat from the engine block. And he slowly walked toward it. He’d learned to do this, with the first corpse that he’d ever had to recover, a Chinese man in the drainage canal of a clandestine tannery. It had become a habit, or perhaps a superstitious ritual. He needed to walk at a measured pace before ushering himself into the presence of death. He showed his badge to the squad of territorial police that had sealed off access to the pine grove, and noticed that Captain Alba Bruni broke away from a small crowd of RIS officers in white overalls and hurried in his direction.

  “Colonel . . . ”

  “Buongiorno, Captain.”

  “RIS has been working on it for a while now, but it seems like a fairly complicated thing.”

  “Things are never simple.”

  “Sorry, what I meant to say is . . . ”

  He watched her blush. And he felt a stab of chagrin for her. There was so much, too much left unsaid between them. The aftermath of a brief and very recent fling that died as he was gripped by the urge to run that unfailingly seized him whenever an affair seemed to be turning into “something serious.”

  Alba was young, determined, and desirable. But she was in love. And for Marco, that was a problem without a solution. Keeping an emotional distance, when it was someone you worked with at close quarters, can be a form of torture. But hurting Alba with a long-term strategy of deception and illusion would just have been cruel.

  He turned his gaze to the charred wreckage of the Smart Car and waved for Bruni to follow him. A sheet covered the driver’s seat. Slowly, Malatesta lifted a corner of it. The stench of flesh and plastic fused together hit him. He guessed from the skull and the upper portion of the rib cage, neither of which the flames had had time to fully devour, that he was looking at a human being. The fire had destroyed everything else.

  “It isn’t even clear whether this is a woman or a man,” said Bruni.

  “And in the surrounding area? Have you taken a look around?”

  “RIS has bagged some evidence: three human teeth, over by the trunk of that pine tree.”

  Bruni pointed to one of the RIS technicians who was collecting shreds of bark, much of it charred, from what remained of a tree a good thirty feet away. Malatesta went over.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Malatesta, anticrime section, Special Ops, buongiorno. Aside from the teeth, what else do we have here?”

  “The area around the car is full of footprints, but we don’t know yet if they have anything to do with what happened. The odds that they’ll tell us anything are about the same as winning the lottery. The fire department made a tremendous mess putting out the blaze and the water they sprayed on it is going to make any work we might do pointless. It’s a swamp now. Anyway, they managed to put out the fire in time to save one of the plaques on the chassis. If we’re lucky, we should at least be able to track down the name of the registered owner of the Smart.”

  “And did you find the teeth around this tree?”

  “Affirmative. And to go on a preliminary visual examination, I’d say they belong to the corpse.”

  “So we can at least say that this wasn’t a car crash or some junkie who fell asleep in his car with a lit cigarette, right?”

  “Affirmative. I’d say this has all the trappings of a murder. We ought to have results in a reasonable perio
d of time.”

  Malatesta nodded slowly.

  “Somebody must have really been pissed off,” he whispered.

  Still walking very slowly, he headed back to his Bonneville, followed by Alba. He reached for his cell phone and dialed the number for General Thierry de Roche.

  “Well, Marco?”

  “Let’s just say that the drive out here wasn’t in vain.”

  “Do you think it’s worthwhile to keep this case for ourselves or should I leave it to the territorial police?”

  “I’d say let’s keep it. At least for the time being, General.”

  “Is there anything I need to know immediately?”

  “Nothing urgent. We’re still on the opening credits. We don’t even know if it’s a man’s or a woman’s body.”

  “Then I’ll see you back in the office.”

  “At your orders.”

  “Oh, I was forgetting . . . As usual, on the Sapone incident, you decided to disregard orders . . . ”

  “If you’d been in my shoes . . . ”

  “Look, I was trying to pay you a compliment, not dress you down.”

  He flicked the red button to end the call and then turned to Bruni, who was standing about ten paces away.

  “Lunch?” he asked, pointing at the motorbike.

  “I don’t have a helmet.”

  “What, are they going to pull us over?”

  Bruni smiled. She delicately wrapped her arms around the colonel, taking a seat on the soft, low saddle of the Bonneville.

  “A pastry at Sisto’s in Ostia?

  “A pastry at Sisto’s.”

  Marco pressed down on the starter button and yielded to the sensation of her small breasts pressing against his back.

  V

  A few days after the death of the Lithuanian woman, Sabrina had received a phone call. “Are you the girl who was with the Honorable the other night?

  “Who wants to know?”

  “A friend.”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Listen up and listen good, you whore. There was no night, no Honorable, no dead whore. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes, but . . . who is this?”

  “I told you, a friend. You just forget everything that happened and live your life in peace. Start getting any funny ideas and I’ll send you to sleep with your girlfriend . . . Did I make myself clear?”

  “Crystal clear.”

  “Good girl. Keep it up, just like that.”

  Sabrina was a practical girl.

  At age seventeen, she’d already had to retake two classes at the vo-tech business school. Books just turned her stomach. She needed to invent something, or before long she’d wind up looking like that shapeless potato sack of a mother of hers, a loser who busted her back soaping the heads of decrepit old bitches for forty euros a day, under the table, without benefits. But where to begin? When she looked around her, in the neighborhood, at school, among her girlfriends, all she saw was apathy and misery. As for her boyfriend at the time, Sandro, a guy from Quarto Miglio—need we say more than that?—even though they hadn’t gone any further than a little bit of protected sex, he was already raving about getting married, children, eternal fidelity, and all that line of bullshit. Another loser ahead of his time: the only reason she hadn’t dumped him was because of the paycheck he brought home as an apprentice carpenter. It wasn’t much, but enough for a pizza out and a joint, which was always better than nothing.

  No. She couldn’t go on like that.

  She had to turn things around.

  And sure enough, things turned around.

  It happened the night she turned eighteen. Sandro had thrown a party in her honor at the Palacavicchi, the megadiscotheque outside of Ciampino. Which meant: a table in the row furthest from the dance floor, the kind of table the waiters tend to turn up their noses at—with a couple of friends of his—complete assholes—the man was a construction worker, the woman, she wasn’t surprised to learn, was a shampooist, and there was prosecco in plastic cups and a stick of hashish that looked like shoe polish to end the evening in a blaze of glory.

  On the verge of despair, Sabrina wandered away from the little group with some excuse. A guy who was leaving the inaccessible VIP lounge guarded by the inevitable steroid-swollen bouncers had given her an interested glance, and then had suggested they go someplace else and get something to drink.

  She had accepted the invitation. Anything, as long as it wasn’t that evening’s absurd party. Someplace else turned out to be the guy’s villa in Grottaferrata, outside Rome. His name was Enzo and he was a broker for a pool of insurance companies. They fucked, pumped up by a line or two of cocaine. That was the first time Sabrina had ever tried cocaine. She liked it, but it scared her a little bit. Anyway, in the end, Enzo handed her a couple of banknotes.

  Sabrina turned the money over in her hands, baffled.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right, beautiful, maybe I was a little stingy. Here, that makes three hundred, but don’t ask me for a penny more, business is going bad these days . . . and maybe next time, you could float me a discount, what do you say?”

  Sabrina could have burst into tears. Or she could have burst out laughing. The guy had taken her for a whore. Sabrina could rebel against the idea or just treat it with chagrin. The choice was hers.

  Sabrina understood, at that exact instant, that the merciful hand of fate was lifting her out of misery and offering her a dazzlingly bright future. That was when things turned around. This was her calling.

  “I’ll give you my cell phone number. Call me when you want. And if you have any friends you want to send my way, I’d be happy to meet them.”

  That’s the way Sabrina’s career began. Her nom de plume, so to speak, was Lara, and she was one of the most sought-after escorts in Rome.

  But Sabrina was a practical girl.

  She certainly didn’t plan to grow old turning tricks.

  Her life plan called for ten years or so as a working girl, no more than that, because this line of work, in the long run, hollowed you out, and there’s nothing sadder than a faded hooker trudging down sunset boulevard, and maybe even—horrible to think of it—back out on some actual street, and not just the metaphorical one. Another three years and she’d be done, finished, over and out.

  She’d open up a little place all her own. A bar. One of those fancy, understated bars where people with Corso Trieste faces go to enjoy their happy hours, playing a game of foosball and maybe snorting a line or two. Or maybe a beauty shop, why not. And she could even install Mama at the cash register.

  But now, forget about it.

  The guy on the phone had been clear. Very, very clear.

  Malgradi had pulled his levers. Spadino was out of his mind if he thought he could blackmail the Honorable. Should she have warned him? But why would she have bothered? Spadino was a piece of shit like all the rest of them. The only smart thing left to do was keep quiet.

  And what if that wasn’t enough? What if they decided that she was still too dangerous?

  Sabrina took down her website, www.larasecrets.com, paid a Romanian to set up a prepaid SIM card, destroyed her cell phone, cut her hair, and dyed it blonde.

  Would that be enough of a metamorphosis?

  And in the meanwhile, how was she supposed to run a business?

  Sabrina had a girlfriend. Teresa was one of those working girls who had exited the profession at the height of her success. She wasn’t like the other ex-call girls: she hadn’t turned into a cloistered nun, she didn’t pose as a respectable middle-class matron, she hadn’t cut herself off from all her old girlfriends. She had a weakness for Sabrina, but not just for her: what with all the time she’d spent around men, she’d learned to loathe them. Women were quite another matter. Women—they were, and always had been, sisters.

  The
y met at the fitness center in the Tuscolano quarter, an establishment that Teresa ran with an iron fist. It served only women.

  “No, but Sabrina, just get out of the business entirely, right? There are no more pimps, who’ll complain?”

  “I can’t. I don’t have enough money set aside to afford it.”

  “Set up another website.”

  “I was thinking of something a little more discreet, a little more confidential. I told you, I can’t explain why, but I have to stay under cover.”

  Teresa took a sip of her fresh juice, an apple-carrot blend, and thought it over. When she leaned forward, she’d delicately brushed her girlfriend’s breast, as if by accident. Sabrina let it ride.

  “You ought to find a way to get into a left-wing social circle, Sabri’.”

  “What? Communists? Those guys hate us!”

  “To hear them talk, sure, but trust me. I’ll let you know.”

  Teresa leaned over again, but this time Sabrina jerked clear of the “accidental” caress. She wasn’t at that point yet.

  VI

  In spite of the darkness, the black sand of Ostia Ponente was still warm. It took Number Eight a certain degree of effort to get over the fence that surrounded the last kiosk operating on a municipal concession before reaching the wharves of the tourist marina. He set down his heavy Technisub duffle bag and looked up at the sign that read PETER PAN, painted in all the colors of the rainbow in lively cursive. He stared at the small stamp at the bottom right. “Municipality of Rome. District XIII. Social Cooperative for the Public Good. State Concession no. 24—May 8, 2007, exclusive beach use, for the benefit of children, minors, and the differently abled.”

  Retards and kiddies, sure! Cooperative, sure!

  Rights to beach access were no joke. That half a mile of beach, closed off to the north by the jetties of the tourist marina, were gold. Solid gold. Like every square foot of beach from Ponente to the gates of Capocotta. Was there or wasn’t there a good reason why, in Levante, the last asshole in line was now willing to pay up to six million euros for a three-year beach concession? Was there or was there not a fucking reason why the beaches of Ponente shouldn’t belong to the bosses of Ponente? Are we or are we not masters in our own homes? Was there or wasn’t there a reason to hold tight to that beach, like the priceless treasure that it was?

 

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