He was stuffing them with food like three sausage skins, just so he could push the edge of the cliff a little further along. But, God be praised, all this was about to end.
As she came walking past, he grabbed Natasha, the Russian college student who made ends meet by turning tricks and whispered into her ear not to mention the special of the day to the Three Little Pigs. That special was meant for the rosy little mouths of those who were destined to yank him out of the frying pan. Just then, Amedeo spotted him and waved him commandingly over to their table. Tito sent Natasha on ahead, but was obliged to tag after her.
“Buonasera, Signori, have you decided?”
“Wow, look who’s here, the Russian girl! Listen, honey, why don’t you bring us some of that German wine, there. What the fuck do you call it? Ge . . . Ge . . . ”
“Gewürztraminer.”
“That’s right. To eat, we’ll take three hot appetizers . . . You know the ones, with the little pieces of toasted bread and octopus on top, right? The usual, are we clear? Then you can bring us three seafood carbonaras. And then . . . what do you have that’s fresh?” mumbled Scipione, as if the whole thing cost him an intolerable effort.
“Everything we have is fresh.”
“Oh, sure, of course it is. Yesterday I burped up swordfish until lunchtime. Let’s do this. Bring us a turbot with potatoes.”
“Baked?”
“How else? Boiled? Hey, do you even eat fish, or do you just write it down?”
They laughed with gusto at the wisecrack.
“Hey, hey, Tito! Tell the Russian girl not to be as stingy as she usually is. Bring us heaping portions, not those usual faggoty servings.”
Nothing new under the sun. They always read from the same tired script, these filthy pigs, and every time it chapped Tito’s ass. How it chapped his ass!
“Come on now, Tito, don’t make that face! You know we love you like a brother!”
Amedeo got to his feet, wobbly on his short legs, and tried to come over and hug and kiss him. Tito took refuge in a half smile. He would gladly have kissed the Three Little Pigs, if they were laid out cold on a slab. Cold on a slab. Still, he thought, as he cast a gaze around the dining room, tonight it would be difficult to find any of those sitting at the tables who were actually paying for the meals they were enjoying. For the most part, they were freeloading just like the Three Pigs. There was that troglodyte Roberto Gerani, a former bricklayer who now demanded that he be addressed as Engineer Gerani, who had renovated the place for him. He was out a hundred thousand clams with Gerani, and he made sure to drop by and eat on the cuff regularly. There was that prosecuting magistrate who seemed to be bronzed all year round, and who never talked about anything but sailboats. Every time, he came in with a different piece of pussy. Then there was that nasty pig from the Passport Office, Dario Bernardi, with his little boyfriend from the Viminal, i.e., Ministry of the Interior, a couple of queens that you wouldn’t believe. In a burst of desperation, Tito had even thought he might try throwing himself on their mercy. He’d tried it, too, one night a couple of weeks ago. But there had been no mistaking the upshot.
“Am I interrupting, sir? Might I break in for just a brief moment?” he had whispered, bowing low at an almost perpendicular angle to Bernardi’s table.
“Why would you even ask, Tito? Tell me, after all you’re the proprietor.”
“Exactly, sir, that’s precisely the problem.”
“What problem?”
“The question of who is the proprietor.”
“But it was just a manner of speech, you must have misunderstood.”
“No, I mean to say . . . I have a bit of a problem with this restaurant. In the sense that I’m in the middle of a situation . . . ”
“Tito, now I’m the one who has to interrupt you. Forgive me, eh, but I’m going to interrupt you, it is I who’s doing the interrupting!”
The faggot’s voice had gone into a shrill falsetto.
“Heaven forbid. I’ve made myself clear, haven’t I?”
“Absolutely. Loud and clear, you’ve made yourself clear. But I have to tell you I have no influence over the health inspections.”
What a piece of shit. Everyone in Rome was well aware—even the rocks and the trees seemed to know—that he was at the end of his rope with the shylocks. Health inspections, my ass. Maggio dropped the subject then and there. He’d backed away from the table with another bow, asking the two faggots if they’d care for a second round of oysters. And when they’d nodded, he’d stuck his head into the open kitchen and whispered to Mustapha to offload that shipment of mollusks that smelled so foul they’d had to park them out in the alley.
But it had to come to an end. It was coming to an end.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the front door was swinging open, and he abandoned the Three Little Pigs then and there and hastened to welcome the new arrivals.
Not two minutes later he was breaking into the silent intimacy of the private dining room, generously pushing a majestic wheeled ice bucket in which stood proudly planted the first bottle of Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs Millesime Brut Champagne. He’d personally arrange for the reinforcements, when the time was right. Only the best, for his guests, the best and with the finest presentation.
“Here are the other friends you were waiting for. Be my guests, gentlemen, come right ahead.”
They were two gentlemen in their early sixties, well, if quite predictably, dressed, stuffed into dark suits and announced by a whiff of cologne and aftershave. Benedetto Umiltà leapt to his feet as if his chair was springloaded.
“Your Excellency, may I introduce you to Ciro Viglione and Rocco Perri?”
Tempesta, smiling, decided there was no need to get to his feet, and with a gentle movement of his hand he allowed the two men to pay proper homage to his ring. Umiltà went on with the boilerplate courtesies.
“These are the businessmen I was mentioning to you, Your Excellency. The South that is determined to survive. Dottor Perri is Calabrian, from Cirò Marina. Dottor Viglione is Campanian, from Casapesenna.”
The bishop nodded, allowing Umiltà to continue, while Viglione and Perri took their seats at the large round table, rummaging in the bread basket as they did.
“I can assure you, Your Excellency, that Dottor Perri is a visionary. Everything he touches turns to gold. Because he can see gold where it seems that nothing is glittering. And thanks to this particular talent he is one of the best funded entrepreneurs in Rome. Oh lord, the last thing I’d want to do is count the cash in someone else’s pockets, but if an honest businessman doesn’t begrudge me the speculation, I’d say that nine hundred million can’t be far off the mark. Am I right?”
Chewing an olive oil-drenched chunk of bread, Perri nodded and dispensed a few pearls of wisdom.
“My grandfather taught me that you need money to make money. So there’s no such thing as too much money, isn’t that right, Your Excellency?”
“The works of man are works of God. And after all, what is money if not a work of man?” Tempesta said wittily.
Viglione expressed his support of the observation by raising his champagne flute.
“You were lucky to have such a wise grandfather, Rocco. I owe everything to the Jesuit fathers of Caserta. They showed me the way.”
“And what a way it was,” twittered Benedetto Umiltà. “Just think, Your Excellency, this gentleman’s family built Latina. And this gentleman brought us the tunnel of Porta Cavalleggeri, the Holy Bypass. You do remember, don’t you, our very first meeting?”
“How could I ever forget?” Tempesta replied with a smile.
Viglione drained the champagne from his flute, savoring his evening out of the rooms and hallways of the Villa Marianna, where he had been under hospital arrest for more than a year now, but where his business affairs had never once stopped prospering
. He left the clinic and returned as he pleased. He knew people, Viglione did. And after taking one look at the monsignor, he knew he was in good hands. The man asked no questions, and that was a necessary prerequisite. In fact, it was the first rule of business. Never ask dove maronna aggio truvate i suorde—where the money came from. He had a mountain of cash, as much as and more than Perri, who himself hardly knew what to do with the money he made from cocaine, slot machines, online gambling platforms, restaurants, and clubs. But Viglione also knew that he’d continue pulling in mountains of cash if Samurai wasn’t just talking bullshit. Every euro he pulled in with the coke wound up in his construction sites. Between the fifteen-story tall mushroom-shaped restaurant Il Fungo at EUR and Caserta, not a brick, a bulldozer, or a cement mixer moved without his say-so. And now, if they brought the benediction of God Almighty into the picture, then fucking hell was all he could say.
“Why, what important people, isn’t this all too much for us?”
The voice of Counselor Davide Parisi made the guests all turn to look at the door to the private dining room. He had arrived with Michele Lo Surdo, an accountant who was Parisi’s partner. They were both about forty-five years old. And they were both marionettes dancing to Samurai’s strings. Samurai had first met them when they were just kids in a chapter headquarters of the FUAN, the youth organization of the extreme right. They were both dressed in cushy pinstriped Cenci suits. Lo Surdo was a shrewd and reckless accountant. He was little more than a straw man at the center of a network of offshore companies that he started up, shut down, and moved around like tanks in a game of Risk. He controlled a couple of paper mills that he used for Samurai, of course, but also for the large clientele of tax evaders who were constantly around, and who needed false invoices like they needed the air that they breathed. He lived in a villa in Grottaferrata, had an obsession with escorts, and was basically Parisi’s natural appendage.
Lo Surdo was well acquainted with Parisi’s extraordinary professional mediocrity. Born into the profession. And what a profession, seeing that his father had become famous defending Dandi. “Davide Parisi? The criminal lawyer who doesn’t know what the penal code even is and who studied courtroom maneuvers in the Monte Mario tribune at the Stadio Olimpico,” as Lo Surdo often liked to say to him, in open mockery. But still he admired Parisi’s absolute ruthlessness and recklessness, knowing that even he couldn’t come close; and to a certain extent he admired his sheer guts as well. Parisi was a no-talent slob, but he would stop at nothing. And that’s why Samurai protected him and was going to introduce him to the client of his life. Rocco Anacleti.
They were all there in part on account of that gypsy. And the people sitting at that table, starting with Viglione and Perri, meant that the thing really was about to happen.
Parisi made a rapid circuit around the table, shaking hands with all the other guests, until he finally came to a halt looking down at Tempesta with a broad smile.
“I told the colleague who represents that mutual friend of ours at the Roman Rota that we have an understanding concerning that problem: we’re going to proceed with the annulment for failure to consummate,” Parisi said to the bishop.
“I’m glad you did, Counselor. Just think, I’d been informed they intended to proceed with a suit for impotentia coeundi. But how could they think such a thing, I explained to your colleague. That lovely boy there. Come, come.”
Lo Surdo took a seat next to Benedetto Umiltà.
“Please don’t forget, Dottore, to come by my office sometime this week, so we can settle the matter involving Cyprus. That way we can move forward with that block of transactions concerning the IOR. You know, we can’t hold that issue in abeyance indefinitely.”
Umiltà nodded and checked his watch. Eleven o’clock. Samurai was running late. Tito Maggio was on a low boil.
“We’ll wait for him to get started, naturally,” he repeated to the assembled crowd for what might have been the tenth time, with his usual anxious urgency. And when he received a chorus of confirmation, he decided to show off his skills.
“A lobster tartare, while you’re waiting? Otherwise, perhaps a nice platter for the table with a salad of razor clams, marinated scampi, an octopus compote, king prawns Toledo style, grouper sushi . . . ”
“Do you have oysters?” asked the bishop.
“I didn’t dare to include them in the list, it struck me as obvious. I normally bring oysters along with the bread and the water. I have my own way of doing them.”
“Which is how?” the bishop’s salivary glands had flooded his mouth.
“We serve them with Beluga caviar and a rockfish tisane.”
Perri raised the forefinger of his right hand.
“That wonderful illegally caught fish from the last time, what was that?”
“We have it again tonight. The carpaccio of porgy from the protected marine reserve of Ponza.”
“That one!” confirmed the Calabrian with a wink.
Benedetto Umiltà, beaming, mimed an applause by softly putting his hands together.
Maggio hastily stuck his head into the open kitchen and handed the order to the three men working the burners.
“Mustapha, just try and fuck up this order and I’ll serve you sliced tomorrow at lunch.”
But why was Samurai running so very late? Tito Maggio felt a shiver of terror. Could he have dumped him too, just like all the others? Was he going to have to resign himself to living out his days as the Three Little Pigs’ personal slave?
Samurai was displaying his customary icy, phlegmatic demeanor, but in fact he was seething with rage. The clock in the Mela Stregata on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II read close to eleven o’clock. Rocco Anacleti was running more than an hour late. Years back, he’d set fire to that place, when the left-wing activists used to go there for their aperitifs. What a waste of effort. He shot a glance at Cellini’s angel, at the center of the bridge that led to Castel Sant’Angelo. He liked Cellini. He felt a little like him. Part bandit and part artist.
He shoved across the counter the cup of green tea he had ordered to kill time.
“I asked for a cup of tea, not a vegetable infusion. And I’d asked to have it served lukewarm.”
The young man behind the bar withdrew the cup with a shiver. He’d never seen such ferociously expressionless eyes as the ones on that customer dressed in black from head to foot. Even though what finally broke those interminable seconds of silence was the arrival of the person whom the customer seemed to have been waiting for all this time.
“Ciao, Samurai.”
“Punctuality tells you all you need to know about a man.”
Rocco Anacleti shook his head with a grimace. Samurai grabbed him by the arm and they walked out into the street together, turning toward Via dei Banchi Nuovi.
“You’re right. You’re completely right. My fault.”
“They’ve been waiting for us at La Paranza for the past hour. And I didn’t ask to meet with you ahead of time.”
“I’ll say it again, forgive me. But I’m out of my mind. Out. Of. My. Mind. You know what I’m talking about?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Spadino.”
“Dead men are never a problem.”
“Dead men aren’t. Killers can be.”
“Do you know who killed him?”
“Number Eight. And I wanted to warn you that that piece of shit from Ostia is now a dead man walking. I’m going to have him butchered, as the Madonna is my witness.”
“How can you be so sure that it was him?”
“I wouldn’t be telling you what I’m telling you now.”
“You know, right, how much I detest errors?”
“I’m not wrong on this.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It is for me.”
“It’s not up to you. It’s my decision.”
“Spadino was my man.”
“That’s of no consequence. Unless you’re willing to tell me why Number Eight is supposed to have killed him.”
“I don’t know why. And I don’t care, either.”
“You ought to, though. You’re just an asshole in a rage. Who maybe doesn’t deserve to have a seat at the table that’s waiting for us.”
“Business is one thing, Samurai. Our street business is completely different. That’s mine and I’ll take care of it.”
“I thought you were starting to look like an actual boss. But in spite of your age, you’re still just a thug. You know who Number Eight is, right? You know how much weight Ostia swings in what we need to do, right? No, I don’t think you do know, Rocco. If we want to bring this deal to a happy end, we need peace, not war. We’ve already heard from the Carabinieri. Are we really going to flush it all away when we’re this close to the finish line?”
“Revenge is sacred to me, Samurai.”
“There will be plenty of time for that too.”
Anacleti clenched his fists and took a deep breath. Samurai’s expression turned grim.
“Don’t give me your scary faces, Rocco. And don’t make me have to tell you a second time. In fact, let me give you one more piece of advice. Avoid putting on your scary face with the poor old Iranians you order beaten within an inch of their lives.”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?”
“Pay that old man. Immediately.”
“Who told you about it?”
“And who told you about Number Eight?”
Anacleti dropped his head. By now they could see the entrance of La Paranza.
“All right, Samurai.”
“All right means you do what I tell you. That you forget about Number Eight and you pay the old man. Is that clear?”
“All right,” Rocco conceded.
That was a promise tossed into the wind, obviously. Like all promises that any Roma chief makes to a gage, a non-gypsy. Yes, certainly, he was talking to the great Samurai. But Samurai himself was just a gage. And, most important of all, Samurai thought like a gage. Vendetta isn’t the sort of thing you can give up so easily. Vendetta is a chieftain’s blood, his heart. That means, Samurai, that you’re just going to have to resign yourself.
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