Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

  Scipione let loose a filthy raucous laugh of self-satisfaction. A fishbone went down the wrong way. He started to cough and splutter. Imperturbable, Sebastiano handed him a chunk of bread, waited for the old man to chew and swallow it, and once the coughing stopped delivered a formidable slap to the man’s back. No more coughing. Scipione appreciated it. He dismissed with an impatient gesture a worried Tito Maggio who had rushed over to help, and promised the young man a raise.

  If Manfredi wanted to have some fun with the engineer’s son, he had the green light. As far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.

  Then he asked Sebastiano to drive him over to the gas station on Via Anagnina, where they picked up a tranny, and he treated himself to a fitting conclusion to the evening.

  Sebastiano declined Scipione’s generous offer to partake, waited for the old man to get dressed, took him home, parked the SUV in the garage, and went off to sleep in his rented room on Via Rodi, not far from his old family home. A reminder that they had robbed him of his life.

  And they would pay. Sooner or later, they’d pay. In the meantime, in the solitude of his narrow room, Sebastiano was training himself in the school of hatred. He realized that he’d be able to learn a great deal from old man Scipione.

  XXV

  Rocco Anacleti was waiting, sitting at the corner table in the Ikea restaurant, in his home neighborhood of Romanina. He hated it. He hated the colorful, cheap lamps. He hated those who flocked to the place like it was some temple erected to the god of consumption, he hated the meatballs with the lingonberry sauce that an impertinent waitress had served him so rudely. But most of all, he hated to wait.

  Terenzi never changed. He still hadn’t understood that when a matter was urgent, he had to move his ass. Right away.

  He was just on the verge of leaving when, even before he saw him with a bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce on a tray, he recognized the whiff of two-bit cologne in which he must bathe every morning. The marshal was in plainclothes. As he was every time they were forced to meet in person.

  Terenzi sat down alone at the table next to Anacleti’s. He loosened his tie. He tucked the paper napkin into his shirt collar and leaned forward over the plate of pasta.

  “You finally made it, Marshal.”

  “I had to take care of something.”

  “There’s just one thing you need to take care of, before I get royally pissed off.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The vans that deliver the caregivers.”

  “Since when have you given a fuck about the caregivers?”

  “I’ll ask the questions. You’re not paid to be curious.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “If there’s an investigation.”

  “Into the caregivers?”

  “If you sit backward on a horse, that horse will always be backward,” Rocco sighed, in Romansh.

  As usual, Terenzi stared at him with a stunned expression. And as usual, Anacleti translated after his fashion.

  “Sorry, I meant to say . . . find out if they’re looking into the movement of the delivery vans.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “‘I’ll try isn’t enough. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow’ already works a lot better.”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  Anacleti stood up from the table and leaned over close to Terenzi’s ear.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not it will be easy. Those two Brazilian hookers you beat up the other day? I had to take them into the emergency room myself. Fucking maniac.”

  Anacleti headed over to the restaurant’s cash registers. And Private Brandolin instinctively turned away, hurrying over to the vacuum-packed herring counter.

  They hadn’t seen him. Neither Anacleti nor Terenzi. He waited until first the one then the other vanished into the crowd at the exit. He pulled out his cornflower blue Nokia. The one with the oversized numbers and keys that his mother had given him the day he took the oath, forgetting to tell them at the phone store that the cell phone was for her son and not for her.

  “Colonel Malatesta?”

  “Brandolin. What’s going on?”

  “I’m at Ikea.”

  “Should that be of any interest to me?”

  “I was looking for a set of recycling bins, and came over after the end of my shift.”

  “Christ, Brandolin.”

  “Forgive me, Colonel. The bins are just a pretext. Truth be told, I came to Ikea with Terenzi.”

  “Have you made friends?”

  A horrified whimper, an almost animal lament, came from the earpiece, triggering an immediate sense of guilt in Malatesta.

  “Sorry, kid, it was just a joke. Come on, tell me the rest.”

  “Terenzi had a meeting with Rocco Anacleti.”

  “What kind of a meeting?”

  “Terenzi came in. Anacleti was sitting at the restaurant. He was waiting for him. They talked for a while. Heads together, busy busy.”

  “Could you understand what about?”

  “No. I was terrified that Terenzi might see me.”

  “He didn’t see you, did he?”

  “No.”

  “And did you really need a set of recycling bins?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Buy the most expensive kind. Consider them a gift from me, Brandolin.”

  “At your orders, sir.”

  Marco set his cell phone down on the wooden folding table that occupied the tiny space between the two lounge chairs in the first row on the playa grande of the Hotel Formentor. Now it was a matter of breaking it as gently as possible to Carmen. Explain the situation to her without hurting her feelings.

  “Carmen, I have something to tell you.”

  The lovely Catalonian blonde with whom he had, so to speak, established a bond over those unforgettable ten days on Palma didn’t even look up from the latest novel by Javier Marías.

  “You going back home, caballero? That’s no surprise. It’s not like we were going to get married.”

  The little speech he was planning to improvise stuck in his throat now. He found himself grinning like an idiot, once again admiring the endless surprises that were women. With a hint of uneasiness he couldn’t exactly pin down: certainly, this hadn’t been the love of his life, but what the hell, with all this looseness in relations between the sexes . . . It’s true, men had been acting this way for millennia. The new development was that now women were doing the same thing. He wasn’t sure how well he liked this new development. He ought to talk about it with Alice. But his thoughts were elsewhere. The phone call from Brandolin was the signal that he’d been waiting for.

  Something was starting to stir.

  And soon they’d be seeing the effects of it.

  The defensive phase was coming to an end.

  This was the time for a counterattack.

  He’d have to start with a series of little steps.

  In the meantime, he’d have to go back to Rome.

  Then gather information. Aggregate data. Arrange for discreet surveillance systems. Focus his intelligence. Lay out the nets and yank them in only at the right time.

  The game was starting up again. Just as he’d expected.

  He bid Carmen farewell with a kiss, he boarded the evening’s last flight on a very expensive first-class ticket and, the minute they set down at Fiumicino, he fired off a text to Thierry: “Phase Two: urgently need line of support.”

  XXVI

  Rocco Anacleti summoned Paja and Fieno to come meet him at the Casilino 900, where the city washed up against the beltway. He had a chop shop there, to convert stolen cars and motorbikes into marketable spare parts for the black market in such things. Another flourishing business that was a part of his empire, and as ancient as the noble art imparted to him by his grandfather, th
e art of stealing.

  Rocco Anacleti arrived in the industrial shed slightly ahead of schedule. And there to welcome him was Zorro in his grease-stained mechanic’s overalls. He was a Croatian in his early forties, and his real name was Vilim. Too complicated, too hard to say, he had thought when he first met him, newly arrived in Cinecittà after the end of the civil war in the Balkans. A better name was “Zorro,” which if nothing else was a perfect description of the horrible ragged scar that ran the entire length of his upper lip, to the base of the nose. A souvenir bestowed upon him by a Serbian knife blade, during an interrogation session. Silent as the masked man, right? And for a job like the one he was doing in this industrial shed, silence was a fundamental prerequisite. He paid him a fortune by the standards of the sector, fifteen hundred euros a week. But his generosity had purchased the man’s loyalty and, with the passage of time, the two men had even become fond of each other. Even though Anacleti knew that, like any wounded beast, one day Zorro too would turn explosively savage.

  Anacleti acted out an embrace, taking care not to get dirty.

  “Everything all right?”

  Zorro pointed to the skeleton of a BMW Adventure GS 1200 in a corner of the shed.

  “I was just finishing that one there. I still need to pound out the frame. This week went well. It’s the fifth one we’ve chopped in three days. And we still have lots of orders. We’re a little behind with the cars.”

  “How far behind?”

  “I have two Jeep Grand Cherokees and a Nissan Qashqai that have been here for a week. I need to get busy.”

  “All is good, then.”

  “Not really, boss. There’s the usual problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “That filthy pig Dottor Renato came by. He said that the shit we’re giving him isn’t enough anymore.”

  Renato Festa was a tick who worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles. A guy in his early forties that Anacleti had gotten to know at the Ferro di Cavallo, where he normally purchased his five grams of coke for the weekend. He had soon realized that the man was in rags because of the cost of his unfortunate habit, and in the end the exchange struck him as obvious at the very least. For his weekend coke blizzards, free-of-cost, and for the occasional extra, like the trannies that Anacleti would send around to see him at his home every first Tuesday of the month, Festa would slip Zorro the spread sheets of newly registered SUVs and superbikes, complete with license plate, name, and address of the owner. And Zorro would send a couple of pint-sized acrobats who used to work in a circus in Zagreb to pay a visit to those apartments. Two artists capable of climbing up any cornice and squirming through even the narrowest grates of any french window. After all, with the new generation of anti-theft devices, the only way to steal cars and motorcycles was with their actual keys. And you had to get into the owner’s home to get them.

  Anacleti pretended he hadn’t quite understood what Zorro had just said.

  “The shit’s not enough? Is that what the little motherfucker said?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Then you take care of it. In your fashion.”

  “I’ll mix up some acid. I love to watch an asshole’s face sizzle.”

  The Croatian’s raucous laughter brought a nod of approval from Rocco Anacleti. He liked Vilim. A lot. And one day—he felt certain—Vilim too would rise at his side through the family’s hierarchy. And Vilim would become his lieutenant. Like Paja, Fieno, and Max. For that matter, the contamination of gypsy blood with what the street had to offer had transformed a band of thieves and Fascist hitters confined to that corner of the Romanina quarter into a heavy crew. These days there was no counting the lines of tough kids hoping for jobs as couriers or lookouts for the narcotics trade. And the Saturday night brawls between punks in their early twenties in the clubs of the southeastern quadrant of the city had become a gymnasium where you could go any time you pleased to select the young blood that would flow into the ranks of the armies that now effectively conquered the opposition of even the fiercest soldiers in town. How many of them were there? A hundred, a hundred fifty, he would have guessed. And the fact that he’d lost count only made him proud.

  The laughter of Paja and Fieno made Rocco Anacleti swing around, jostling him out of his thoughts. They’d arrived.

  “What the fuck do you have to laugh about?”

  The two men apologized and stood, arms folded, a stance they assumed when they knew they were about to be given orders.

  “Now listen to me, and listen good. I want you to go to that fucking Iranian’s workshop and put this down on his table.” Anacleti pulled a wad of bills in different denominations out of his pocket. Hundred-euro notes, fifty-euro notes, twenty-euro notes. “I don’t even know how much this is. Definitely more than the thousand euros that beggar was pestering me for. Give him the money, tell him that this is from me, and this marks the end of it. That if they ask him about it, he has to deny everything. No, wait, even better, tell him that he has to go in to see the Carabinieri, and tell them that nothing happened at all. Is that clear?”

  As always, Paja couldn’t restrain himself.

  “Why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “Why can’t he just go without us giving him all these euros? I can convince him without the cash.”

  “Paja, you know something? I can’t stand to look at you anymore. Do what you’re told or I swear, as God is my witness, if I hear you ask just one more question, I’ll crack your ass open with my own hands.”

  The two men spun on their heels in unison, like a pair of cops, and then screeched out of there in their black BMW toward the Tuscolano quarter, Via del Casale Ferranti, the zammammero’s workshop.

  In spite of the wheelchair, Farideh had agreed to accompany him every morning to his workshop, where Abbas remained alone for hours until his daughter came back to get him. Seated, virtually immobile. In contemplation of everything that his hands would remain unable to do for many months yet to come. Or maybe never again. They had already operated on him twice to reduce thirty or so fractures and insert the first of two pairs of titanium plates that—according to the doctors—would never restore the sensitivity of his hands, but might at least give him back that smidgen of mobility necessary to put food in his mouth, get dressed in the morning, get undressed at night.

  Paja and Fieno walked in on him while he was deep in the study of an album of sketches by his grandfather.

  “Buongiorno, can I help you?”

  The two of them hadn’t seen the old man since that night. And the courteous nature of that greeting caught them off guard. What, was the old man sick in the head?

  Fieno did the talking, because of the two he was the one whose voice Abbas hadn’t heard the night of the punitive expedition.

  “These are for you.”

  He tossed the wad of cash on his workbench, under Abbas’s inquisitive eyes; those eyes immediately filled with tears, while a sudden tremor started shaking his body.

  “Don’t worry, old man. It’s all over.”

  Abbas nodded. Mechanically and repeatedly. As if an electric discharge was jolting through him. Incapable of uttering a single word. While a jet of urine drenched the crotch of his trousers. Fieno went on.

  “There’s just one last thing you have to do. Get someone to take you in to see the Carabinieri, and tear up that sheet of paper you signed. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  Without bothering to wait for the answer they took for granted, the two men left him in his filth and with that wad of cash he could look at, but couldn’t even hold in his hands.

  On his way out of the workshop, Fieno touched a couple of ebony miniatures.

  “These little dolls are nice. Do you make them?”

  How many hours went by after that, Abbas couldn’t have said. But when Farideh arrived in the workshop, she found him just as Paja a
nd Fieno had left him. First she stared at him, then at the money on the workbench. She raised a hand to her mouth and started weeping. At first quietly, then sobbing in despair. Without the strength to get closer to her father and put her arms around him, her father who reeked of sweat and urine and who was sobbing like she was.

  There was no need to explain anything to his little girl. Farideh had understood. And now, he, her father, had to decide.

  “Don’t do it, Papa. Don’t accept.”

  Abbas shut his eyes, and his memory of the night when he had seen Teheran for the last time, thirty years ago, became clearer. He felt the eyes of the two pasdaran in khaki jumpsuits on him, at the airport border checkpoint. He saw once again the hairy hands of the elder of the two. The man was turning over and over in his hands the passport that a cousin in the revolutionary council had miraculously managed to obtain for him. It said that he was a newly graduated student traveling to Rome for a semester of specialized studies at the medical school there. The pasdar had shut the document and then he had looked at his hands gripping the handle of his suitcase. His entire life was in that suitcase, along with the savings in foreign banknotes that his father and mother had entrusted to him, in a final act of protection. Two thousand dollars.

  “And you’re supposed to be a doctor?”

  Abbas had nodded.

  “What kind of a doctor?”

  “Surgeon,” he had muttered, betraying the trembling of his lips.

  “With those hands? You’re a surgeon and you have those hands?”

  He’d shut his eyes. It’s impossible to rub away the calluses from working with chisels and woodcarving knives. The pasdar had repeated the question.

  “With those hands?”

  They’d dragged him into a dirty little windowless room. They’d made him open his suitcase.

  “Dollars. Congratulations to our talented little surgeon with his golden hands. You know you could be hanged for this, doctor. You know that?”

  The two pasdaran had split the banknotes in uneven shares. Fifteen hundred to the older man, the rest to the younger.