Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

  “You know what you remind me of? One of those Japanese guys in the movies . . . the ones with the curved swords that are always sitting around scheming how to crack open some enemy or other’s head, probably over some slight to their honor . . . what do you call them, come on, help me out here . . . ”

  “Samurai.”

  “There, right, that’s it. Do you know who you are? You’re a fucking samurai. And don’t take this the wrong way if I say it to you, but seeing that you’re going to kill yourself anyway, it’s just words anyway . . . but the way I see it you don’t have the slightest idea how things work in this world.”

  “And who’s supposed to explain it to me, you?”

  “Look, do whatever you think best. But tell me one thing: you go ahead and kill yourself, and do you think that the world gives a good goddamn? Sorry, you know, but if they didn’t care when you were a politicized armed robber, do you think they’re going to get scared at the sight of your corpse? So now turn out that light, because now I need to get my eight hours’ sleep, or tomorrow I’ll have bags under my eyes, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s having bags under my eyes.”

  Samurai tried not to pay too much attention, but the words of that cleaned-up street thug had opened a crevice inside him that widened day by day. He let a little time go by before returning to the topic.

  “So listen, all things considered, what do you think I ought to do?”

  “What’s chapping your ass is this idea you have that the world has screwed you. Then why don’t you pay the world back in the same coin? Screw the world. Screw everyone. You’ll see how much better you feel, afterward. Just like after a good thorough fuck, trust me on this, Samurai.”

  Who knows. Maybe Dandi had a point. And maybe there was more truth in his words than in all the books that had opened his mind when he decided to abandon the main thoroughfare his parents had chosen for him, the law degree, his father’s law office, an office that had belonged to his grandfather before him, and his great-grandfather before that, and even before that . . .

  Or maybe, quite simply, Dandi had told him what he wanted to hear.

  Suicide was put off for some other day. Dandi and Samurai left the penitentiary of Regina Coeli together.

  Dandi introduced him to his friends.

  Samurai joined the gang.

  But that was a long time ago.

  Dandi was dead.

  Libano was dead.

  Lots and lots of others were dead, too, a few had turned informant, a few others were just doing their time and keeping their mouths shut, dreaming of when they could start over, maybe with some modest little office job.

  Samurai was still around. His old nom de guerre meant nothing more than abandoned dreams, at this point. Dandi was the one who had pinned that name on him, but he’d done his best to live up to it.

  And power—that was concrete, alive, and real.

  Samurai was the top, the number one.

  Even though, whenever anyone reminded him of the fact, he preferred to reply, with one of his enigmatic smiles: I’m just the first among equals.

  That way, no one ever took offense and business could continue. It was all the fruit of his instincts. It had all begun with the boys from Il Bagatto, and the harvest from the seeds sown there had been a rich one. The network extended over the whole city. Unbreakable ties of loyalty.

  Certainly, there was no longer anything heroic, by this point, in that drab, gray Rome he had inherited from the days of daring and ardor. The loansharking that he had once scorned as beneath him was now his daily bread. And maintaining his iron grip on the government of the night was a highwire act that forced him into continuous concessions to worms devoid of heart, guts, and brains.

  But that’s the way things go in this world, right, Dandi?

  Samurai gestured for Max to come over.

  The young man stared at him with eyes that could still ignite with passion. There was once a time that he too . . . Perhaps that was why he saw in Max the person he’d been back then. Or maybe, if destiny had allowed him to bring a son into the world, he would have wanted him to be like Max. Different from the pieces of shit in Ostia and Eastern Rome. With the fiber and the nature of a boss. Still capable of catching fire. And even of making mistakes. Like that other one, the one he had betrayed so many years ago.

  “Tell me that pity has nothing to do with the story of the Iranian, Max.”

  “He’s just a poor old man, Maestro. What the hell could he ever have done to the Anacletis to make them unleash those two animals on him?”

  “Nothing, in fact, to tell the truth, they’re in the wrong. They failed to pay a debt.”

  “And so . . . ”

  “And so pity too has to be kept out of this and all other stories, Nicce.”

  “Achilles, too, was moved by the tears of Priam, and gave him back Hector’s dead body.”

  “That’s a comparison that’s out of place here, my boy. That wasn’t pity. That was respect for a valorous enemy. The code of war. And in fact, after that the Greeks entered the palace and slaughtered all the Trojans. Or did you forget that part?”

  The young man bowed his head.

  Samurai continued, in a soothing voice.

  “We don’t like the Anacletis, but we need them. We have to permit them a certain amount of brutality. It’s a way to keep them under control. Still, we are in agreement. Those two troglodytes, Paja and Fieno, have gone too far. But don’t you worry about it. I’ll take care of things.”

  Samurai sensed that his explanation hadn’t persuaded Max. Oh well, he’d understand in due time. Before dismissing him, he slapped him affectionately on the back.

  “I have great plans for you, Max. Important things are going to happen in the next few days, and I want to be able to count on you. But leave your pity at home. This world doesn’t know what to do with it, believe me.”

  IX

  Hello? Spartaco?”

  “Yes, who is it?”

  “It’s me, Pippo . . . ”

  “Ah, Pippo . . . but listen, I don’t remember: do we know each other?”

  “Of course we do! I’m Pippo from the Fidene borgata. What, don’t you remember? We met at the opening of that bar in Trigoria, it must have been right before Easter. Pippo, the tall guy who brought the kid with the captain’s jersey that you autographed for him, ‘Spartaco, Heart of Roma’ . . . ”

  “Hey, you know what I say, Pippo?”

  “No, what do you say?”

  “That I owe you an apology. E-e-eh, it happens, I just forgot . . . it must be the passing years . . . ”

  “What are you talking about, Spartaco, you don’t age, you’re immortal.”

  “Or else, it could be this heat that’s eating us alive . . . ”

  “It’s killing us, Spartaco, it’s killing us!”

  “Or maybe the thoughts whirring around in my head, and let me tell you, I’ve got plenty of those this morning.”

  “Well, forget about them, Spa’, you’re still the best.”

  “E-e-eh, forget about them? easier said than done . . . Oh well, Pippo, what did you want to tell us?”

  “I was listening to the news about this new trainer . . . this kid . . . But who did he ever train before? What has he won?”

  “Nothing, Pippo, nothing is what he’s won. At A. S. Roma they always hire the rejects.”

  “Hey, couldn’t they find anything better on the market, though? They say they want to make the club great again, but if you ask me, I’d say that . . . ”

  “That everyone’s good at talking, right? The Americans, the Russians, the Arabs . . . yeah, we’ve seen it all here, under the dome of St. Peter’s . . . Oh, what? Excuse me a second, Pippo.”

  “Of course, Spa’.”

  “What?”

  “I said: of course, Spa�
��.”

  “No, I was just talking with the director . . . Oh, sure, the sponsor . . . well, you could’ve thought of it earlier, couldn’t you? Sheesh, we’re all working hard here, what do you think . . . Come on, guys, step it up, get busy . . . Pippo? Are you still there, Pippo?”

  “What do you think, when I finally get you on the phone, I’m likely to let you go so easy, Spa’!”

  “Right you are, Pippo. We need people like you. Big hearted people like you! Listen, Pippo, can I ask you a question?”

  “Ask me? Of course you can, Spa’.”

  “Does law and order matter to you, Pippo?”

  “Oh, what are you kidding? When you take away someone’s sense of safety, you’ve taken away everything.”

  “It couldn’t be any more obvious. Well, all of you who care about law and order, all of you who go off to work each day and leave behind you, at home, your wife, your girlfriend, your mother, your sister, your daughter . . . all you who no longer want to live in the fear that without warning some gypsy might break into your home—and I say gypsy just to name one possibility, because none of us here at Radio FM 922 are racists, but it’s a well-established fact that when there’s a burglary in an apartment, an armed robbery, a home invasion, you can beat about the bush all you want, haggle over the details, but in the end it’s always them . . . So, to make a long story short, all of you who want to live in peace, then guys, I’m not kidding, at least once you have to drop by Rubinacci Armored Doors and Locksmiths, on Via di Tor Marancia number 77 B, let me repeat, number 77 B, where you’ll find the answer to all your . . . ”

  Alba Bruni entered without knocking. Or maybe, actually, she had knocked and Marco Malatesta just hadn’t noticed, concentrating as he was on the words being spouted on the A. S. Roma soccer fans’ favorite radio station. He lowered the volume and invited the captain to have a seat. Out the plate glass windows of the anticrime section, on the third floor of an office building that was . . . how to describe it? functional? . . . they enjoyed an enviable panoramic view of the Ponte Salario. The Torretta dei Crescenzi—a historical tower house and the last remaining memory of a once-glorious past filled with passions that were forgotten for good now—could barely be glimpsed behind the wall of—how to describe them? functional?—buildings that had turned the ancient suburb into an unsettling slice of modernity. When all is said and done, Marco Malatesta thought to himself, a perfect picture of our condition as servants of the state besieged by the filthy products generated by many of the very people we are supposed to be serving.

  “RIS made a call.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  He grabbed the freshly printed sheet of paper that Alba had just handed him, focusing just an instant too long on the fact that their fingers brushed. Alba, Alba . . .

  “Identification almost certain.”

  “They traced it back from the Smart Car, in fact. Now they’re going to cross-check it with the mother’s DNA, but still, they’re pretty confident.”

  “How pretty confident?”

  “You know what RIS are like. There are times when they can be exasperatingly slow, but all in all, we can rely on them. Let’s just say that they were willing to go out on a limb. The charred corpse from Coccia di Morto is this Marco Summa.”

  They went over to the terminal and checked him out together. Alba smelled of apples, just a hint, nothing intrusive. How the hell do women do it? There was a scorcher of a summer waiting in the wings, the air conditioning was working one day and broken the next, and she, and all the others, every last one of them, seemed to have just stepped out of a beauty center.

  “Can we concentrate on work, boss, please?”

  “Sorry. All right then, let’s see . . . ”

  Marco Summa had a criminal record for small-time drug dealing, as well as a criminal complaint, charges that were later dropped, for pimping and aiding and abetting prostitution. On the screen there appeared a fairly recent identification photo. A ribald pose, eyes that were struggling to appear grim, and perhaps awe-inspiring, but which actually just looked dull and blank. They’d seen hundreds—the colonel and the captain had—of faces just like that one, out on the street, in the police station interview rooms, in the dock during trials, during investigative interrogations in prison. Young men with no heart and little if any brains. The cannon fodder of small-time criminal enterprise. Maybe Marco Summa, AKA Spadino, as his file stated, had tried to make the qualitative leap to a new level and had come face to face—he, pathetic mouse that he was—with some crueler, hungrier rat.

  “On top of everything else,” Alba pointed out, “he appears to have gone missing a few days ago.”

  Well, this took care of that matter, no doubt about it. But bit by bit, as they worked their way through the documents on Spadino—arrests, case reports, tips—his cop’s intuition shifted his focus away from routine bureaucratic matters to the code red of more serious matters. Deadly serious.

  “He died outside of his district, Alba.”

  “Right. It says here that he was arrested twice by the Carabinieri, Cinecittà precinct.”

  “And someone burned his body in Ostia . . . I’m catching a whiff of broken boundaries. And when someone like Spadino crosses a boundary, someone might get royally pissed off.”

  “Mhm . . . And then there are a few other details worth taking into account. I’ve done a little sniffing around. At the Carabinieri station in Cinecittà something seems to have happened. In just the last year, two colleagues taken off the force for actions unbefitting an officer, a lance-corporal and a brigadier. Two kilos of cocaine and twenty, let me repeat, twenty kilos of hashish gone missing. The entire staff of the station has been reshuffled.”

  “So who’s in charge now?”

  “A certain Terenzi. Maybe we should summon him to come in.”

  “Let’s go see him in person. Right now,” Marco decided.

  “I need an hour,” she said, “I need to finish my report on this Spadino.”

  Once he was alone, Marco went back to listening to Radio FM 922. Spartaco Liberati was still pontificating. On the other end of the line, there was a new interlocutor, a certain Gino from Ostia.

  “You’ve got a point, Gino. Rome isn’t what they say, the wise men writing in the newspapers, the big names . . . people who don’t even know Rome, who have no idea of what the streets really are.”

  “And you’ve got a point, Spa’.”

  “Now, you take this corpse they found in Ostia. Now they’re trying to paint Rome as if it was Al Capone’s Chicago. A city full of criminals, a city without law and order . . . but you know who they really are, the people saying these things, Gi’?”

  “They’re the same as they ever were, Spa’.”

  “Of course they are! It’s the leftists, communists, and they can’t stand the fact that they’ve lost city hall, so now they think they’re white knights defending law and order! But, my dear gentlemen, you should have thought twice before handing the city over to the gypsies and the zammammeri! So now, Gi’, you know what I say to you? That maybe that poor sucker in Ostia was just smoking a cigarette and he dozed off and set himself on fire. And even if there was, let’s say, a murder . . . well, we can’t keep everything under control, can we? You know the way these things are.”

  “Hey, Spa’, you’re the greatest.”

  Yes, Sports fan radio is so relaxing, thought Marco Malatesta, with a smile.

  But it’s also so useful. This was something he’d kept from Alba because, aside from General Thierry, no one knew anything about his past. Sports fan radio acts as a barometer, giving you a read on what’s happening in le curve. And le curve are the barometers of what’s happening on the street. The megaphone of those who are excluded from the communications networks belonging to the people who count, or at least think that they count. Fan radio is the voice of a silent mass that navigates on a wav
elength all its own. A wavelength that is impenetrable to the usual instruments of analysis. For example: the fact that Spartaco Liberati should be dedicating such a substantial chunk of time to the dead man in Ostia is a fact that makes you stop and think, Colonel. It’s not just an old Fascist activist lending a hand to the right-wing majority. It signals concern, let us even say, uneasiness; and someone wants to strangle that uneasiness as it is being born. It’s an oration aimed at “whom it may concern” at the behest of someone has been tuned to that famous frequency since the earliest day. Understand who. And why. That was the task awaiting him and Alba.

  A chain of events had swung into motion, and the trigger had been Spadino’s charred cadaver.

  Marco was perusing Terenzi’s personnel file when Captain Bruni burst into his office. A little ahead of schedule.

  “Nothing doing for today, Marco.”

  Terenzi had taken a personal day off. The mission was postponed until tomorrow.

  “Then I’m going to pay a call on an old friend instead,” said Marco.

  At that exact instant, Rocco Anacleti was receiving a phone call.

  The dead man in the pine forest had been identified. Without the shadow of a doubt, it was Spadino.

  The gypsy intoned in a low voice, “I travelled and travelled far and wide . . . ” Gelem Gelem, a Romani dirge that evoked the extermination of the Black Legion. It was dedicated exclusively to his people.

  Spadino wasn’t born a Roma, but he was as close to a Roma as a gadjo could ever hope to be. And he had died like a dog, massacred and then burnt. His soul would long struggle, in the afterlife, to reassemble the pieces of his violated body.

  Anacleti experienced a brief moment of heartbreak. Then, natural and unrestrainable, the thirst for revenge burst forth.

  Spadino, goddammit, was one of his men.

  Rocco Anacleti sent a text.

  Number Eight was awakened by the tune of Faccetta nera playing on his cell phone. He shoved aside Morgana, who’d been sprawled at an angle over his hairy, manly chest, and read the text.