Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

  They’d given in when he begged them.

  “Please, please, just take the money.”

  Abbas opened his eyes again. Farideh was still standing motionless in front of him. She’d stopped sobbing. Now the tears were running down her cheeks, gathering in large welling drops on her chin.

  Thirty years ago, he’d allowed himself to be humiliated by his jailers. He’d purchased his freedom for two thousand dollars. That same freedom that had brought him, first, a new homeland, and then the joy of the marvelous creature now sitting across from him. That roll of euros from the Anacletis wasn’t really all that different from the dollars he’d handed over to the pasdaran, after all. His daughter’s life and serenity were worth another humiliation in the face of his latest tormentors. Even at the cost of her contempt. One day, she too would understand.

  “Farideh, please, put that money in my pocket and take me to see the Carabinieri.”

  XXVII

  The morning following his return to Rome, a furious burst of ringing from his doorbell caught Marco off guard in the middle of one of his recurring dreams. He was in a green meadow, densely carpeted with tiny white blossoms, and lots of little dogs with brown spots were frolicking around him, chasing each other happily, blithely indifferent to the troubles of the world. According to the female psychologist from Seattle he’d spent a few days with, between conferences at the 1999 World Social Forum, that dream was an indication of some deeply buried yearning for innocence. Maybe there was some truth to that, but the fact remains that whenever he bent over to pet the puppies, they disappeared as if by magic, leaving him in the throes of a melancholy sense of abandonment. As for the psychologist, their love story had come to a brusque end. Largely because, in the face of her impassioned attempt to analyze him, he had retorted with a sarcastic and exquisitely Roman, “And who gives a fuck!”

  In any case, it was a little past nine.

  Who could be looking for him at that time of the day?

  General Thierry, maybe?

  But for the general Sundays were sacred. It couldn’t be him. Unless something serious had happened.

  He grabbed the Beretta lying in plain view on the nightstand and walked toward the front door.

  “Yes?”

  “Ah, you’re here. It’s Alice. Open up. I need to talk to you.”

  Alice. Only then did he realize that he was completely naked.

  “But how did you find out where I live?” he asked, stalling for time, as he struggled with the first item of clothing he had been able to lay hands on, a tattered terrycloth bathrobe that had once been red but now verged on an unsettling drab pink.

  “You gave me your card, Sherlock!” she retorted drily.

  He opened the door.

  When she saw him appear before her in that odd getup, she couldn’t help but laughing.

  “I give up,” she said jokingly, putting her hands in the air.

  Marco stuck the pistol into the pocket of his robe and invited Alice to come in.

  “Two minutes. The time to take a shower and I’ll be with you.”

  Alice looked around with a certain uneasiness at the furnishings of the small apartment on Via Monte Bianco, in the heart of the nondescript Talenti quarter. It looked like the set of a movie from several years back. A place where time had stopped. The little living room with the good sofa and the mahogany table surmounted by the sideboard with the porcelain service for twelve. The green-and-white flowered bathroom tiles in majolica. A corner shower flush with the floor, enclosed in a shower curtain on sliding hooks that featured a lithograph of the crucial scene from Psycho, the one where the deranged Anthony Perkins dressed as Mother Bates lifts the kitchen knife high to strike his blonde victim, Janet Leigh.

  Her uneasiness derived from the sense of normality that the whole place inspired. A normality both petty and bourgeois, solid, that emanated a sense of goodness. Of bonds that do not shift due to self-interest.

  Fate hadn’t been so kind to her. Her folks had eaten away at each other for years, engaged in an unsustainable trench warfare, until the definitive abandonment of that marriage, a divorce that had left its mark on the troubled adolescence of their only daughter. Once they’d come to a separation agreement, they’d handed Alice off to Grandma Sandra, her sole bond with the filthy world. Alice had played out her brief alternative existence in perfect freedom. A bad period, something she’d tried to forget. For a little while, she’d fallen prey to furious panic attacks. People who’ve never experienced them have no idea, but a panic attack is something very close to being at death’s door. It unfailingly happened to her when she was wrestling with a major life decision. She’d liberated herself by taking up boxing. When the decisions involved are: either hit, or be hit, it becomes immediately clear to you that there are no right decisions and wrong decisions. The decision is always right, and it’s always the first one. It can go well or it can go badly, but that is no longer within your own control. At that point, the panic attacks vanished. She’d learned to seize and discard opportunities without thinking too hard about it.

  Marco reappeared. Black T-shirt and jeans. Wet hair, freshly shampooed. He smelled good. Wonderful, to tell the truth.

  “Here I am. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you, to say the least. And also, I’m not very coherent first thing in the morning. And . . . should I make you a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  He seemed emotional, less self-confident than she remembered him, Alice thought, as he bustled about preparing an old Moka Express coffee pot.

  Was she the reason for that effect?

  Alice felt attracted to Marco. In some inexplicable way. And that attraction frightened her. They were too different for anything good to come of it. She could have told him the news with a phone call, and that would have been that. But the thing was, over the past few days, she had frequently caught herself thinking about him. And wondering: why not?

  Alice started looking around the bedroom. A few pieces of Ikea furniture, an unmade futon with an A. S. Roma poster over it, a gigantic Yamaha stereo system lodged in a messy combination of cubic shelves where Marco kept his collection of two thousand vinyl records.

  Then, in a surprising contrast, signs of a globetrotting existence: the head of an Burmese Buddha, a Ganesh with a mocking expression, a Balinese batik with a scene of the battle between the Pandava and the Kauravas, a statuette of a laughing peasant in a Maoist uniform.

  “I spent a few years in the MSU, the support unit for the foreign diplomatic missions. I can say ‘I like you’ in a considerable array of languages, both living and dead,” he smiled, appearing from behind her with a tray and espresso demitasses.

  “I just love this Buddha. It imparts a powerful sense of peace,” Alice murmured, as she caressed the statuette.

  As they were drinking their coffee, Marco told her about the souvenirs that he couldn’t put on display. His memories: The sneer of opportunist politicos. The impenetrable masks of the dictators for whom he’d had to act as a bodyguard. The handshake with which he’d said farewell to the secret agent who’d become his blood brother in Iraq and who had been cut down by friendly fire as he was using his body to shield a hostage he had just liberated. The Afghani child bride he had torn out of the clutches of her husband/owner. His memories of those years abroad.

  “We’d been given orders not to intervene. But disobeying orders is sort of a specialty of mine.”

  “And how did you do it?”

  “I did it, that’s all that counts.”

  “Did you have to . . . kill?”

  Marco didn’t answer. She took his hand.

  “While you were talking, you didn’t seem like a Carabiniere.”

  Marco smiled.

  She released her clasp.

  She told him everything in a rush: how Abbas had been paid by the Anacletis, the sarcastic gr
in with which Terenzi had greeted her and Abbas’s daughter at the Carabinieri barracks when they had come in to file their complaint, the libelous campaign undertaken by Spartaco Liberati, who had called her a tick and a Carabinieri spy. She also added that the neighborhood locals had even stopped sending in the usual number of tips to her blog.

  “They’re afraid, that’s clear.”

  “They’ve stopped trusting me, Marco.”

  He tried to comfort her. The fact that the criminal complaint had been withdrawn didn’t mean a damn thing. The investigation would continue anyway.

  “I really doubt that,” she shot back, spikily. “You know what’s going to happen? Even if I decide to take this thing down to the bitter end, Abbas won’t show up at the trial to identify his assailants and torturers. And even if he does show up, he’ll just say he was mistaken. You see what’ll happen as a result? And don’t tell me that you don’t know that.”

  “I do. I know it, Alice. And that’s why I’m going to keep going.”

  “Down the wrong road,” she said, needling him.

  Marco threw his arms wide in a gesture of helplessness.

  “I don’t know any others.”

  “Because you’re a part of the system,” she pointed out, “and maybe you represent the best part of it.”

  “What’s that supposed to be, a compliment?”

  “Still,” she went on, ignoring the question, “when a system is rotten to the core, you can’t change it from within.”

  “The famous revolutionary shove?”

  “I’m not a violent person, Marco. And I’m not a visionary lunatic. It’s going to take time, I know that. But things are going to change. It’s in the air that you breathe, change is everywhere. Look around. Look at what’s happening. The world is full of people who can’t stand another minute of this world order. Go online and google certain key words, like Occupy, or Zuccotti Park . . . ”

  He looked at her with a mixture of tenderness and exasperation.

  “Zuccotti Park, Occupy . . . you think you’re the first person to come up with this, Alice, Jesus fucking Christ! Go tell that story to Rocco Anacleti, Paja and Fieno, Adami Cesare AKA Number Eight, oh, and tell Spartaco Liberati while you’re at it, of course . . . In any case, with or without your help, I’m moving forward on this. Even though, with you,” he added, softly, “it would be so much nicer . . . ”

  Alice sealed his lips with a kiss.

  What the hell, sure, maybe she’d even waited too long for that.

  To comply with Rocco Anacleti’s demand—was there or was there not an investigation underway into the caregiver ring?—Marshal Terenzi turned to a friend in the immigration office. His name was Polillo, an inspector with a long career behind him and a regrettable weakness for cards and Nigerian hookers. And it was in fact in the waiting room, to describe it euphemistically, of Queen Elizabeth, a Junoesque women who stood 5’ 11” and had a generous 44-inch bust, that Terenzi waited, his nerves increasingly on edge, while the inspector consummated the thoughtful cadeau that Terenzi had so generously bestowed upon him.

  Still, how long was this guy going to take? He’d been sitting on that sofa with his legs splayed, smoking cigarettes, listening to every excruciating detail of the Nigerian’s stagey moans of pleasure and the rutting grunts of his interservice cousin from the State Police for too long. Even though Terenzi had been perfectly clear with the negress: something quick, because afterward I need to talk to this guy about serious matters.

  Clearly, though, Polillo had some catching up to do after a dry period. Or maybe he’d just overdone it with his daily dose of Viagra.

  At last the inspector emerged, his face lit up by an idiotic smile. Behind him was the bored expression of Queen Elizabeth.

  “Hey, it’s true what they say, negresses really do have a fifth gear, Tere’ . . . Oh, I really owe you on this one, you’re a real friend, you are.”

  “Oh, sure, a friend . . . do you think I cashed in my weekly chit with her for your pretty face? You want to get something to drink, Poli’?”

  “What I need, the shape I’m in after that, is a crate of Gatorade . . . you ran me ragged, beautiful!”

  “And you come back to visit when you like, sweetie,” the Nigerian tossed out mellifluously.

  Sure, but at your own expense next time, you cheapskate, thought Terenzi to himself, locking arms with the man. They wound up in a pub on Via di San Martino ai Monti, and over a beer Terenzi reminded Polillo about “that little favor.”

  “Oh, right, of course, the caregivers. But why are you interested in knowing, sorry?”

  Here he is, the cocksman. Now he was even acting suspicious.

  “Because Anagnina is my territory, Poli’. And after all, if something’s going to happen, it ain’t right for the State Police to take all the credit.”

  “You have a point! There is a little something . . . ”

  Polillo knocked back a gulp of beer and leaned forward, lowering his voice.

  “But it’s not ours. That shit belongs to the COS.”

  Terenzi nodded. He hated those smartasses from the Central Operations Service every bit as much as Polillo did . . . They were cops with hard horns, those guys, people willing to get their hands dirty, more than smartasses.

  “There’s a guy who’s spilling the beans, an informant, I hear,” Polillo went on. “He says that behind the traffic in caregivers, there’s a coke-dealing ring. They haven’t weighed in yet because they want to work their way up the chain. But in the next few days something big’s supposed to happen.”

  “Wow, Poli’! This is dynamite!”

  “Oh, I never said a word to you, eh!”

  “We never even saw each other,” Terenzi said brusquely.

  He walked out of the bar, leaving Polillo with the check. The least he could do was pay for that.

  XXVIII

  Marco took Alice out to La Paranza.

  It was only right to show her the kind of human beings that might disgust generous-hearted utopians like her but that, in the flesh, she’d never before encountered.

  “The unctuous and over-courteous character who obtained this wonderful secluded table for us, from which we can survey the comings and goings of the capital’s gilded youth . . . ”

  And he went on with a description of Tito Maggio, followed by abundant laughter.

  “Those three fatsoes who are scraping all the flesh out of the lobster and spraying crustacean juice thirty feet in all directions. People call them the Three Little Pigs . . . old shylocks. Just think, one time, one of them . . . ”

  And then he trotted out the story of when the nastiest looking of the trio, the one in the middle who looked like an even more obese Oliver Hardy, yeah, that’s right, him, while getting fellatio from the wife of a guy who owed him, aboard the inevitable SUV, but hers in this case, to save on gas, had actually been rear-ended by a drunken truck driver and came very close to losing the family jewels.

  “Excuse me, though, but how do you know these things?”

  “Wiretaps.”

  “Ah, so that’s what they’re for. Then the people who want to outlaw them are in the right!”

  And more laughter.

  Marco went on.

  “That’s not all that wiretaps are good for. For example: you see that distinguished-looking gentleman holding court at the table with the soccer players? He’s a prosecuting magistrate. And he’s in debt to the tune of a hundred fifty thousand euros with the Three Little Pigs. On account of his gambling habit.”

  “And he takes cash in exchange for trials!”

  “We don’t have proof. But we’re keeping an eye on him.”

  “And what is he doing with the soccer players?”

  “Look, that man has only one good quality. He’s a die-hard A. S. Roma fan.”

  “Well, well, well.�
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  “You just really can’t stand soccer, can you?”

  “No. If it was up to me, I’d make it illegal.”

  “I can see our future cohabitation is going to be problematic.”

  “I’d make cohabitation illegal too. And especially families.”

  “That there is something we might agree on.”

  “In other words, from what you’re telling me, it’s a sort of latter-day version of The Sound of Music. Everyone singing from the same page.”

  “Sure, but don’t let yourself be taken in by this typically Roman display of fellow feeling and bonhomie. Half of these people have some horrible skeletons in their closets. And the other half is ready to cut each other’s throats to get their hands on them.”

  “Get their hands on the skeletons or the closets?”

  “Both. Around here, nothing is thrown away, as long as it has some market value. This is Rome, sweetheart.”

  “And that guy who just came in?”

  “The guy who’s all out of breath, as if he’d just emerged from a bout of torrential sex? Sorry, I don’t know him.”

  “Well, I do, so there.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. His name is Pericle Malgradi.”

  “That name rings a bell.”

  “He’s an Honorable, from some right-wing party, or maybe a center party, I don’t know, but anyway all home, family, and whores.”

  “Now I’m the one asking you the question: how do you know that?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes. He brings carloads of them to a downtown hotel, La Chiocciola. A sort of high-end sex parlor. I went there with Diego. You know that the rooms are named after famous actresses?”

  Marco reacted with a smirk.

  “Diego from the meet-up? The Rebel Dragon?”

  Alice didn’t respond.

  “Our room,” she went on, “was called the Anna Magnani Suite.”

  He was on the verge of letting go with a bitter zinger. But he decided not to humiliate himself. Retroactive jealousy would be a form of surrender. Better to keep that to himself. She smiled at him, openly ironic.