Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

  At the front door of La Paranza, Tito Maggio welcomed Samurai with a hug from which the other man recoiled in disgust.

  “You stink. And I haven’t had dinner yet.”

  “Forgive me. But you know, I’m so happy to see you. And after all, this magnificent evening out . . . ”

  “I’ve already told you, you just make sure you satisfy the demanding palate of the bishop and his faggoty little boyfriend. Do that and I’ll take care of your problems. There’s no need for you to wrap your arms around me and smear your smell of sauce on my clothes.”

  Preceded by Anacleti, Samurai entered the private dining room, interrupting the antipastos. For the first time, the bishop got to his feet. Samurai gripped both his forearms and looked into his eyes.

  “Your Excellency, you are our shepherd and this is your family. With your blessing and your involvement, ours will be acts of pure goodness.”

  “I am here to listen,” the bishop nodded.

  Samurai gestured to all the others to continue eating. Everyone except Losurdo and Parisi.

  “Pull out the plans, the sketches, the estimates, and the documents with the proposed variants on the zoning plan. And explain to His Excellency and Dottor Umiltà just what we’re thinking about when we say social housing and Waterfront.”

  XIII

  He’d given them explicit instructions, their boss had. A job done right. Two, three, four . . . In other words, pop as many caps as it would take. No fuckups. No shooting their mouths off. Silent as clams. With everyone. And leave not a trace. The gat had to be clean, and the “horse” to ride into the pasture would need to be clean too.

  Naturally, Paja didn’t have the slightest idea of why the Anacletis had decided to rub out Number Eight. Did Spadino have something to do with it? Maybe. But wasn’t there a pact of some kind with the people from Ostia?

  Who knew.

  You know what, though? Who cares, he’d said to himself. And not merely because it was out of the question to argue or ask questions when the order came down from Rocco. But because, as his grandfather used to say, thinking just makes you anxious. To say nothing of the fact that, sometimes, the work could be fun. Like this time. Why not. Number Eight had been overdoing it for some time now. A buffoon who was always fucking other people in the ass. Like his uncle who was locked up, just for starters. But also Denis, his good buddy. Lord knows, another two-bit lunatic. But there was no comparison. Denis was a real man, with a pair of balls. And a pair of balls isn’t something you can buy at the supermarket.

  He had it in for Number Eight himself. Old disagreements about girls. At a certain point, Number Eight had got it into his head that he had some kind of special right to screw them before anyone else. Even if they were his friends’ girlfriends. Even if his friends really cared about them. That’s how things had gone with a girl that Paja was crazy about. Vanessa. Number Eight had laid his foul paws on her, and when Paja had objected, Number Eight had just laughed in his face.

  “What are you talking about, Paja, when you say we aren’t supposed to lay hands on our friends’ women? When have we ever been friends?!”

  Right. Exactly. He’d arranged for the gat. A Slavic-made Luger 9 x 21 mm., just brought in from Bar, the open port of Macedonia. The guy who had procured it for him, an ex-con who lived in Mungivacca, on the far side of the Romanina district, had left it for him in a hut behind the Ikea. Because it wasn’t a good idea for them to “lay eyes on each other.” As for the motorbike, Fieno had borrowed it from a young doctor over in Quadraro, one of those guys who was so precise and courteous it made you want to vomit. Coked out of his skull. If he’d ever guessed what the black-and-yellow BMW 1200 GS Adventure he was so proud of was going to be used for . . . but then again, when the nostril is running dry, you always think of your old friend Fieno, don’t you?

  Then it’s time to pay your debts, Doc.

  You couldn’t even breathe on Piazza Lorenzo Gasparri. It was one of those nights without a breath of air. The sea smelled like an open sewer, and it lay motionless. Not even the junkies in Largo delle Sirene, the drug-dealing piazza they controlled, had bothered to show up. Crushing a mosquito on his purple-and-yellow Los Angeles Lakers jersey—go fuck yourself, you look like a bumblebee—Number Eight thought back to how poisonous it could be. He was sitting with his ankle on his knee on the trunk of an Alfa Romeo Mito parked a hundred yards or so from the Caffè Italia. And he continued massaging his right ankle, swollen like an old man’s—don’t tell that I’m already starting to get varicose veins, what the fuck.

  That evening he’d told Moira—the tattooed bartender who’d been around, a little past her sell-by date—that she could close up early. In that heat, not even the slot machine junkies had shown up. He thought the chance to quit early would make her happy, but instead the change of program seemed to throw her off. It was only when she’d pulled down the bar’s security shutter, revealing the garter belt under her red skirt that was squeezing her big ass tight, that he’d understood. And in fact a 220-pound Romanian in his early fifties had come over and given her a kisss on the cheek. Just take a look at our poor Moira. Since the days when Uncle Nino used to take her for a ride, she’d slid down the slope to these horny Slavs without a penny to their name.

  On the bypass, Fieno hit 100 mph almost without noticing it and, decelerating with a brusque downshift as they came up on the off-ramp for Via Cristoforo Colombo toward Ostia, he lifted the visor of his helmet to speak to Paja, folded over on himself in his denim jacket, inside which he was holding the Luger.

  “Sure enough, these fucking Germans are just phenomenal. Hey, Paja, have you heard what this boxer engine sounds like? Forget about Japanese bikes. Japanese bikes can kiss my ass. This thing, you open her up and she takes off.”

  “Sure, okay. But wait until you go in for your registration renewal, then you’ll laugh.”

  “Why, do you renew your registration?”

  “No.”

  “So?”

  “It’s just something I said. To say it.”

  “There’s times I don’t understand you, Paja.”

  “What’s there to understand.”

  “Don’t get mad, eh. But sometime you really strike me as an asshole.”

  Through the jacket, Paja let him feel the Luger, pushing it up against Fieno’s back. Almost at the center of the Dainese logo that covered it.

  “You see you got pissed off right away?”

  “Fieno, I just don’t have any imagination. Try to understand.”

  “What did I even say. I’m just joking around. What, are you on edge?”

  “I’m looking to get done with this job we have to do.”

  “Hey, Paja, if it was your first time, I’d understand. But we’ve been in the middle of these tarantellas for a lifetime now.”

  “What do you think I’m talking about, Fieno? For me, beating someone up is like making a bowl of pasta all’amatriciana. I was nineteen years old when I whacked my first man. Just think. But if you’re going to make a pasta all’amatriciana, you have to make it right: makes sense, right?”

  “Now you’re making me hungry. What if we stopped for a panino or something? You work better on a full stomach. There’s a nice kebab place at the first turnoff for Casalpalocco.”

  “What is there?”

  “A kebab stand.”

  “Oh just go fuck yourself. Open her up, get going. Otherwise we won’t get there in time.”

  Number Eight was talking on his cell phone. He was politely explaining to the manager of a club who was two months late with his “enrollment fee” that spending the rest of what life was left to him in a wheelchair wasn’t a particularly bright prospect, so he should pay, and waste no time doing so. As he was speaking these words, the motorcycle carrying Paja and Fieno rumbled slowly down the Lungomare Duca degli Abruzzi, Ostia’s waterfront road. Fieno downshifte
d to first gear, keeping a steady speed of 20 mph, with his left hand gripping the clutch handle. Paja lifted the visor of his helmet to get a unobstructed view. The coast was clear. He noticed the security blinds of the Caffè Italia were down.

  “Just take a look at that. Why is the place shut? And where the hell’s that asshole?”

  The imprecation caught in his throat. A sudden surge of adrenaline reached his brain at the sight of the guy in the yellow tank top sitting on the hood of an Alfa.

  “Here you are, handsome. Here you are now. Now you’re done running the show.”

  With his left hand, Paja gave Fieno a light tap on the ribs, who slowed down even more. Thirty yards. Twenty. Now Paja could make him out clearly, Number Eight. He’d just tucked his cell phone into his pocket. Paja clinched the grip of the Luger, pulled it out of his jacket, extended his right arm. He fired the first shot when the BMW was right in front of the target. The bullet blew the Alfa Romeo’s rear window to smithereens.

  Number Eight threw himself to one side, falling onto the asphalt between the Alfa and a Volvo parked next to it. He started crawling on all fours while Paja’s semiautomatic continued vomiting fire. He could no longer tell how many shots had been fired. Lying prone as he was, he was only aware of a stabbing pain to his eardrum and a shower of broken glass bouncing off the backs of his hands as he tried to cover his head. He didn’t even hear the shout that preceded by a fraction of a second the roaring acceleration in first gear as the motorcycle took off.

  “Go! Go!”

  But his eyes. His eyes were still good.

  He slowly got to his feet, staring at the tail of the motorcycle as it veered to the left, heading down toward the water. He impressed on his retina the image of the passenger riding pillion. The piece of shit who had just shot at him.

  A long blond ponytail hung out of the helmet. And he knew that ponytail well.

  They remained silent until they reached Axa. There Fieno slowed down and raised the front of his full-face helmet.

  “That guy’s not getting up again, is he, Paja?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  Paja said nothing.

  Something told him that the driveby had gone wrong. But he lacked the courage to admit it.

  Marco and Alba arrived half an hour later. The territorial police and the white-jumpsuited officers from RIS were already onsite. Two sleepy-eyed local crime-beat reporters were jotting notes. The assistant district attorney on duty, bored out of his skull, was chainsmoking.

  The cast of the scene of the crime, arrayed in their full glory, in other words.

  Well, maybe full isn’t the word. The victim was missing. The blood. The witnesses. And the audience.

  “Someone shot someone else but didn’t get them,” the lieutenant who commanded the Ostia Carabinieri barracks confided disconsolately, “and that’s all we know. Otherwise, a total fog. We recovered eight cartridges, but there might be more. No one saw a thing, no one wants to say a word.”

  “It’s nighttime,” Alba commented, stifling a yawn.

  The lieutenant shot her an ironic glance.

  “It’s Ostia,” he replied, pointing around at the shuttered windows, the deserted streets.

  “True,” Marco confirmed, “it seems there aren’t a lot of rubberneckers around here.”

  The lieutenant smiled. His name was Nicola Gaudino, he came from Naples and there was no mistaking how he yearned to get back to the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. The geography of the Camorra clans, complicated though it might be, seemed much more reasonable than the rigorous omertà of Ostia.

  Between one bureaucratic requirement and the next, day had dawned. The assistant district attorney went back to Rome. RIS broke camp. The first early morning wayfarers poked their heads out, shot a vaguely curious glance at the police barriers and the vehicles bearing unmistakable marks of gunshots, and then continued on their way.

  Sisto was just opening. An old waiter recognized Gaudino and offered to make everyone a nice piping hot black coffee.

  They sat down at a small café table still damp with the cool night dew. The lieutenant spoke to the waiter.

  “Did you hear anything last night, Giova’?”

  The waiter spread his arms wide, in a gesture of resignation.

  “I see all the usual faces at the tables, Lieutenant. And maybe I might even hear what they’re saying. But I mind my own business. Certain names are best left unsaid.”

  “But why?” Alba butted in.

  “Eh, my dear Signora,” the waiter sighed, “you all come out here, you take a look around, you might even do a little something. But then you leave, and I have to go on living here. So, certain names are best left unsaid.”

  “The Sale clan. An old criminal aristocracy, if aristocracy is the right word. And the Adamis,” the lieutenant went on wearily, “the real boss is the uncle, Nino, but he’s in prison. He’s left all family business in the hands of his youngest nephew Cesare, who goes by the name Number Eight on account of the fact that his head is bald as a billiard ball. He runs a club, the Off-Shore, with a few other nutjobs just like him. We suspect he does a little of everything. Drugs, construction, even some arson of the beach establishments that won’t fall into line.”

  “Murders?” Marco put in.

  Gaudino grimaced in bafflement.

  “They rubbed out two old and powerful bosses a couple of years ago. Cases that were never solved, of course. But for some reason, I think that with those two killings the Adamis and the Sales made a clean sweep and became the bosses of the place. To find proof of it, though, you’d have to be a shrub in the shadow of the Hanging Tree.

  “The Hanging Tree?” asked Alba curiously.

  Marco heaved a sigh. Ah, the historical memory.

  “It’s the heart of the pine grove of Castel Fusano. There’s a bench. In the old days, the gang members used to go there.”

  Gaudino broke in.

  “Yes, but nowadays it’s for a different reason. They go there because there’s no cell phone reception. And anyway, that Cesare is capable of anything. In any case, the people aren’t going to talk.”

  “Oh, but it’s not like we’re in Scampia here, for the love of Christ!” Alba snapped. “We’re practically in Rome. Not twelve miles from the Colosseum.”

  “Captain, I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Gaudino interrupted her, “but the truth is that here it’s the bad guys who take care of the have-nots. They give jobs and a scrap of hope to those who have neither. Here, if someone steals your moped, you don’t go to the Carabinieri, where we sit behind locked doors, safe and warm. You go around the corner, to Piazza Gasparri. And the thing is that when they go to the bad guys on the piazza, the bad guys get their moped back for them, while all we do is take their complaint. After all, what’s a criminal complaint? Words on a piece of paper. Around here, the ones they love are the bad guys, Captain.”

  “That’s the same story they always used to tell in Corleone,” Marco cut him off brusquely. “But then at a certain point that came to an end.” Speaking to Gaudino, he ordered him to organize, and immediately, a roundup. “Yank them out of bed. The Adamis, the Sales, their hired hitters, their young thugs, their small-time dealers, their wives, their sisters. All of them. Take twenty men, no, take thirty. If you need men, I’ll send some over. Load them into paddy wagons and haul them in to the barracks, to give them a bracing new view of things. Serious interrogation sessions and search their homes with a fine-tooth comb. Let’s give them the idea that we’re breathing down their necks.”

  Gaudino, who would gladly have given him a bearhug, limited himself to snapping to attention.

  Marco thought it over for a minute, then added his final instructions.

  “And I want you to ask everyone, and I mean everyone, about Samurai. Act vague, as if you
didn’t really care about it, just a routine investigation.”

  Both the lieutenant and Alba stared at him in bafflement. Marco realized, to his horror, that that name, Samurai, meant nothing to them.

  The problem with those kids was their youth. The lack of historical memory, to be exact. They lived in the present. It was up to him to bring them up to speed with past events.

  With a sigh, he started telling them the whole story.

  XIV

  In the basement premises of the Carabinieri station on Viale Marco Fulvio Nobiliore, in the heart of Cinecittà, a short, powerful, hairy man sat on an unsightly, off-kilter chair, in the interview room. Facing him stood a tall young woman, a full five foot ten, with chestnut hair and jutting cheekbones. A red satin top revealed a generous 38 cup, while a skimpy green skirt sheathed long legs that were perfectly waxed. And while her attire unmistakably declared her profession, you had to look much closer to see that she wasn’t really a woman at all. Her official name, in fact, was Jesus Fernandes da Silva Pereira. She—or he—was born in Recife, in the poorest part of greater Brazil, but now her professional name was Lorena. After traveling around most of Europe as a working girl, fate had brought her to the boulevards of Eastern Rome. She’d been working in the area for no more than a couple of weeks when the Carabinieri had stopped her in a routine check. As for the fireplug of a man sitting across for her, he was Carabinieri Marshal Carmine Terenzi. Since Lorena was new to the quarter, Terenzi, conscientious commander of the territorial police that he was, had taken it upon himself to explain to her the rules of the game.