There was, there was, no doubt about it, there was.
“Waterfront.”
The Waterfront, Samurai had explained to him with a broad smile.
“Ostia is going to be Rome’s Waterfront. Boardwalk Empire,” he had mouthed in English. “Atlantic City, Italy. Think, try to think. Force yourself to rise a little higher than the sidewalk, every once in a while. At least an inch or two. I know that it’s practically impossible for you, but give it a try. I’m not saying every day. But now and then.”
“Uoter what?” he’d recoiled; after all, he barely spoke proper Italian, forget about English.
Samurai, the way he always did, had glanced at him with a look of compassion, which rapidly faded into a sneer of disgust. And then he’d translated, the way you do with an illiterate.
“Casinos, hotels, restaurants, health clubs, yachts, shops. That’s what Waterfront means, you brain-dead fuck.”
Number Eight was as touchy as a gorilla. A lunatic who caught fire over nothing. But he’d taken the abuse because of the respect he owed Samurai. And for the money that shit was promising to bring in. “Just think, uncle, this time I’m going to give you the gift,” he’d said, warming up as he talked to Nino in prison, repeating like a pet parrot the word he didn’t even understand, uoterfront. “I’m going to get you er uoterfront, uncle!”
But on one condition: that the beach be cleared of outsiders. Because the Communists, during their time running the city, controlling the city council on the Campidoglio, the Capitoline Hill and the seat of Rome’s city government, had done more damage than a hundred flood tides. “The sea belongs to everyone—sure, boom!” they had said. And they’d entrusted six lots of beachfront—six, not just one—to a handful of bums. Cooperatives, they called them now. What kind of fucking cooperatives, though? Of a bunch of damned zecche; ex-hippies, leftists, Commies, dope smokers, collectively known as zecche, ticks.
It had taken a while to get things back the way they belonged. Number Eight had begun supplying cocaine, free of charge, to that human vacuum cleaner and whoremonger the Honorable Pericle Malgradi who, God bless the souls of his fucking ancestors, snorts more coke than oxygen. And sure enough, the bet had paid out. Now he had him by the balls. Things had changed. The Communists were out of power, and there was a new law, which stated that the concessions would be renewed only for those who had “proven that they knew how to successfully and efficiently run a socially crucial service such as bathing services on the coastline.” Words that were music to his ears. And in particular, they were a signal that it was time to get busy.
Because, let’s just say that, heaven forbid, the beach establishment were to burn to the ground on you, whose fault is that? Yours, because you were incapable of “running it successfully and efficiently.” And if someone else, an ambitious person, happens to have the cash and is willing to lay it down, and is capable of “running it successfully and efficiently,” then it’s only fair that he should nab the concession. It’s the free market, no? And that’s what the law says, anyway. As for the “socially crucial service” for little kids and the handicapped, they were as capable as anyone else of putting in a slide, a merry-go-round, and a rubber swimming pool. But where they decided. A good way off from the beach, where they wouldn’t get in the way. After all, what difference did it make to them?
And so, one after another, the kiosks had burned down. And it was all his doing, Number Eight’s. Because it was his responsibility. One kiosk a week. Always at night. Always with the same gasoline and the same rudimentary triggering mechanism, placed in the electric panel of the beach establishments. The rest went without saying. Dried out by the briny air, huts, beach umbrellas, and gazebos went up like newspapers. In a second. And the spectacle of blazes on the beach had become a regular appointment, almost as popular as dogfights, which were a magnificent draw you could set up in a garage. People came from all over Rome to watch pitbulls tear the flesh off each other by the chunk. Okay, it brought in a few euros, too, but that wasn’t the point: nothing was as good as a show.
He looked at the dial of his Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The hands said it was past midnight, and he needed to get moving. PETER PAN: this was going to be between the two of us.
He texted Robertino, one of the guys who’d been working with him since he was a kid. “Let’s go.”
The first firework, a whistler, rose straight into the air over Piazza Lorenzo Gasparri as he started tampering with the electric panel of the Peter Pan center. The second firework, a rocket that burst open into a weeping willow of green, white, and red sparks, illuminated the gas tank that he emptied over the kiosk. For a moment he stopped to watch the fireworks bursting into the air from the terraces of the barracks in Piazza Gasparri and Via Forni, the geographic heart of Ponente. Nuova Ostia, his Ostia. An idea of his own, because, as Uncle Nino had taught him: “If you want to count for something, it’s not enough to do the despicable crime. You have to make sure that people know who did the despicable crime.”
He’d left Peter Pan for last. It was a beachfront establishment where little kids actually went; the work of destruction would demand a few hours of overtime. The seven-foot slide, built like some medieval castle, and all the toys, tractors, and spring-mounted plastic horsies, stacks of buckets and sand molds, boogie boards, Gormitis and Pokémons . . . in other words, a nasty job that had to done by hand, and all before flicking a lighter.
He found the axe next to the fire extinguishers. Factory new. Perfectly balanced, too, with the original edge on the blade. With a light, hardwood handle, and a red axe head. He grabbed it with his right hand and raised it high, about even with his ear. Then he staggered toward the slide with a voice that he forced to be that of a falsetto, bowlegged, like an ogre in a Saturday morning cartoon.
“Oh children, my darling little children, Captain Hook is here, he’s he-e-e-ere! Tick, tock, tick, tock.”
In less than ten minutes, he’d demolished the dream castle with methodical fury.
“Oh, oh!” crack. “Oh, oh!” crack.
He accompanied every blow of the axe with a clever phrase and a smile. Then the time came to devastate the play area, with its tractors, bouncy horses, and surf boards. At last, he fished a cigarette out of his jumpsuit and flicked his burnished metal Zippo with the silhouette of the Duce into flame, twice. First for the cigarette. And then for the Peter Pan.
The gas fumes and the glow of the flames enveloped the kiosk in a second as he walked back down the waterfront promenade and tossed his duffel bag into the back of the Hummer. He revved the enging and pulled out as a lilac-colored fountain of fireworks concluded the display in the sky over Ponente.
The Off-Shore, realm of Number Eight, wasn’t far away. It was right on the beach of Coccia di Morto. Eleven thousand square feet of wood and glass overlooking the water. Just a sample of what “er uoterfront” would be in Ostia. The name Off-Shore had been chosen by Number Eight, in defiance of Samurai, who said that he was an ignorant as a bag of hammers. Forty-five hundred square feet of bar criss-crossed on a perpendicular by a counter in the shape of a Fascist lictor’s staff. A gym with five treadmills overlooking the beachfront, a boxing ring, and an assortment of weights that would be more than sufficient to keep a team of Olympic contenders in shape. In a corner, near the storeroom where they kept the liquor and, when needed, the gats, and which was secured behind two armored doors that opened with a combination, he’d also set up a tribal tattoo center, Er Geko, with little waterbeds for the clients. And, of course, he’d carved out the space for three darkrooms that seemed like a collection of bedrooms out of Scarface. The Seashell, the Hammock, and the Merry-Go-Round.
That little plaything had cost him plenty. But not in terms of materials or labor, because people worked for him free of change. No, it cost him in terms of the cash needed to grease the hand of a general in the municipal police, a fucking animal. A piranha fish. A hundred
thousand euros right away, in stacks of ten euro bills. A Romanian whore all tricked out for a “full-service” party for his son’s eighteenth birthday, and a rubber dinghy made available all summer long in the Canale dei Pescatori, with Yamaha outboard motors, 250 HP each.
But he was all set, at least, with his permits.
It was three in the morning, by this point, and the Off-Shore was packed. Number Eight stank. Of wood, burnt plastic, and sweat. He tossed the keys to his Hummer to Albin, the Romanian parking lot attendant who was rolling himself a joint the length of his hand.
“If they get it dusty, you’re fucked.”
He slipped into the Conchiglia and found Morgana snorting a line, bent over the glass coffee table that sat right in front of the huge bed in the shape of an oyster shell. Such a nice ass on that girl. Pert, petite, snug. She was twenty years old and she was the only female from Ponente that he had accepted into his crew. But not because he was screwing her. Because out on the street she was cruel as a witch, and in bed she was as docile as a geisha. He slipped a finger between her ass cheeks, laughing as he whirled his tongue around in her ear.
“I’m looking to relax. But not now, later. Let me get a shower and then I’ll see you in there. Who’s here?”
“Just about everyone. Even Rocco.”
“Anacleti?”
“Yeah. He came with that rat Spartaco.”
“The journalist?”
“That’s right, Liberati. He told me he hadn’t been by to say hello in too long.”
“He must want money, that scab.”
Morgana emerged. He took a quick shower, massaging for long minutes his neck and his chest, upon which the face of a joker laughed, beneath the chest hairs. He put on a white shirt, snorted a couple of lines, and headed over to the bar.
Rocco Anacleti, Spadino’s boss and the chief of all the gypsies in Eastern Rome, came toward him, arms wide open, struggling to push his way through a swamp of coked-out teenage girls, lawyers, doctors, and the occasional cleaned-up street thug from Fiumicino, and gave him a bear hug. He’d dressed himself up with a pink shirt and a pair of white-linen pasha pants that made him look shorter and fatter than he really was. It seemed like a sincere hug. Obviously, he knew nothing about Spadino. Nothing at all.
“All good?”
“All good.”
“I’ve been waiting for you forever.”
“I had a lot of things to take care of. I don’t know who else to hit.”
“Tell me about it. Cinecittà is turning into a circus. Everyone wants to be the boss. Even the damn zammammeri think they can do whatever they want,” he said. “All of ’em, gyspies, fuckers from the east, Arabs, junkies. It’s just unbelievable.”
“It’s a freak show out there.”
“Speaking of which . . . have you seen Spadino?”
Number Eight pretended he’d been caught off guard.
“Me? No, why?”
Rocco gave him a funny look.
“He said he was supposed to have a meet with you.”
Number Eight started hearing an unsettling background noise.
“With me? When?”
“I dunno, yesterday, I think. Anyone, no one’s seen him. And they say someone found a burnt corpse in the Pine Grove.”
“Yeah, I heard about that . . . But what does that have to do with Spadino?”
“The burnt corpse was in a Smart. And Spadino drives a Smart.”
“So what can I tell you? Try asking around. Oh, I see you brought Spartaco.”
“And guess what that guy wants?”
“What does he ever want? Money, right?”
From the bar where he stood sipping a mojito—cadged for free, no doubt about it, thought Number Eight—Spartaco was waving his arms in a Judas Iscariot greeting. He was a former Fascist comrade now in his mid-fifties, with a history as a two-bit kick-boxing champion that had ended early and badly. He had been expelled from the Federation for putting an adversary into a coma. He had crushed the man’s cranium with a kick while he was flat on the mat. Then he’d ventured into the radio business, and everyone now knew him as Spartaco the journalist. The voice of Radio FM 922, “the year of the March on Rome, for Christ’s sake.”
The journalist. Oh, sure. Spartaco was a puppet, dancing on the strings of anyone who paid him. A lapdog owned by Samurai, who had known him since he was a kid, during the war with the Communists. Money, money. That was the only word he understood. The only thing he was seeking. And in fact, money was what he was there for.
“Fabulous this Off-Shore. Looks better every day,” he said.
“Spartaco, I don’t have time. Just tell me what you want.”
“No, nothing, it’s just that I’m running a little low with my sponsors. Maybe, if you can spot me ten thousand, I’ll run your Off-Shore on the radio for a month or so. Maybe, you could be interviewed a few times, live, what do you say?”
“A thousand. And don’t show your face around here again.”
“You’re a pal.”
He didn’t even bother to reply. He grabbed Morgana by the wrist, dragging her away from some guy who’d been drooling over her for a while.
“Now I feel like it.”
VII
I’m Teresa’s girlfriend.”
“Ah, Teresa, Teresa, perché sei tu, Teresa?” He sang the words of an old song, then segued into a courteous greeting. “Come right in, make yourself comfortable, don’t linger in the doorway. And you are?”
“Justine.
“The Divine Marquis’s Justine or the little fox of a Jewess in the Alexandria Quartet? But what does it matter? Come in, come in, my dear.”
In his day, the Professor had been famous, very famous. So famous that even Sabrina had heard of him. Just a few days before they met, Sky TV had broadcast an old movie based on one of his hit novels. The Professor played himself in it: an absent-minded intellectual, half a philosopher and half a comedian, who could make you laugh at the miseries and paradoxes of life.
Huh, thought Sabrina as he welcomed her into his large apartment on Via Nomentana, huh, look how he’s aged! The salt-and-pepper man in his fifties with the deep blue eyes had been transformed into a bent, quavering old man who had to stop and brace himself against some piece of furniture every couple of steps to keep from losing his balance. On the walls, framed production stills winked down mockingly, portraying the Professor at the height of his success. The hallway they walked down to reach a vast living room that opened out onto an enormous terrace was lined with books tidily stacked in bizzarely shaped bookshelves. There were incomprehensible paintings and unsettling sculptures.
“Pascali . . . Bacon . . . Tano Festa . . . ”
The Professor rattled off a string of names that Sabrina had never heard of. The tone of voice in which he described his treasures was weary, resigned, and vaguely ironic. As if to say: but why am I wasting my breath on you, seeing that you’re ignorant as a goat?
“Just wait for me here a moment, my dear. I’ll finish getting ready and I’ll be right with you. I imagine that Teresa must have told you what this is all about . . . Justine.
“I know everything, Professor. You can count on me.”
“Trust is a serious matter,” the Professor psalmodied, suddenly grim-faced.
Then a cunning smile appeared on his yellowed, parchment-like face, and the Professor started singing an old advertising ditty: “Galbani, Galbani, Galbani means trust!”
Teresa had warned her: “He’s a little odd. He lives in the past. He just hates it that the film crowd doesn’t give a damn about him anymore. But he’s filthy rich, and he’s nice enough in his way. If you know how to work him . . . ”
Filthy rich. Well, the place he lived was promising enough. Sabrina jotted down a few notes on her iPhone: the names of the artists that the Professor had mentioned. Lat
er, she would look up the market prices on the internet. Maybe it would turn out those scribbles were worth thousands of euros.
“Well here I am, darling. Do you mind calling a taxi?”
“Are you sure you’re not forgetting anything, Professor?”
“Ah, yes, of course, so sorry, my dear, I apologize, you must forgive me . . . we said eight hundred, I think, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Uncle Mimmo, my dear, to you I’m just Uncle Mimmo.”
So if he was Uncle Mimmo, she was the niece from the country who was studying Economics at the Roma Tre University in Ostiense, and she was staying with him temporarily until she could find accommodations more appropriate for a young college student. That understanding had been the reason for her chaste blouse and the non-designer jeans, the little red jacket with an unostentatious brooch, the minimal amount of makeup, and the flat, sensible shoes.
“No slit skirts and no four-inch heels, no pushup bras, and keep your tattoo covered up. Remember: you’re a leftist.” Teresa’s words of wisdom.
But Teresa was overstating things. The first glance that Sabrina got when she and the Professor made their entrance into the penthouse apartment of the producer Eugenio Brown didn’t strike her as all that devastating after all. There were male Communists in jacket and tie or scarf, but there were also plenty in Merrell sneakers and deconstructed linen by Etro. There were female Communists that were modestly attired in unrevealing clothing, though still with a touch of skillfully applied makeup, and there were young things in dizzyingly short skirts showing off scraps of sexy intimatewear, who were happily teetering on skyscraper heels. In other words, there were individuals there who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a party thrown by Malgradi’s friends, and others who wouldn’t have made it past the first glance of the line of bouncers. If she’d dressed up the way she usually did, with that aggressive, whorish array that constituted her second skin, she would have avoided seeming like what she looked like right now: a pallid, insignificant glass of water.
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