“We can do our work here without anyone bothering us.”
Paja looked at Fieno. And leaning forward from the back seat, he grabbed Number Eight’s shoulder.
“All right, let’s do this another way. I’ll get out alone and I’ll go behind those fucking bushes. Fieno can stay here and keep you company. If you’re fucking with us, it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Eh? What do you say? Seem fair?”
Number Eight smiled.
“That’s fine. If that’s how you want it, Fieno and I will just watch the show. Lights, camera, action!”
Number Eight turned on the Hummer’s headlights, Paja got out of the SUV and started walking toward the patch of vegetation lit up by the headlights. Fieno watched his partner from inside the car, not yet sure whether to be alarmed or to settle down to watch him take out his fury on that miserable wretch from Casalpalocco.
Paja took a few steps on the dirt surface, then he felt his cell phone vibrate in the rear pocket of his jeans. He grabbed it with his right hand and automatically raised it to his ear. He recognized the voice of Rocco Anacleti, distorted and breathless.
He was shouting.
“Where the fuck are you? Where are you?”
“At the Idroscalo, with Number Eight.”
“It’s a trap. It’s a trap!”
In the chilly light of the dazzling xenon headlights, Number Eight saw Paja turn slowly around toward the Hummer with the cell phone held to his ear. Number Eight silently opened the fanny pack he was holding between his thighs, and pulled out the .38 caliber handgun inside.
Fieno felt its muzzle against his temple and heard Number Eight’s voice.
“Don’t even try to move.”
Holding his right arm extended toward Fieno’s temple, Number Eight started the engine. He put the Hummer into low gear. He jammed his foot down on the accelerator, steering with his left hand. The automatic transmission launched three tons of Hummer straight at Paja’s silhouette. He screamed as the nose of the SUV hit him full on, just above the shoulders, decapitating him then and there. Ripped off of the body, the head with its ponytail landed somewhere in the darkness.
Fieno vomited onto the dashboard. The whole time, Number Eight never lowered the straight arm that held the .38 against his temple by so much as a degree.
“What the fuck! You’ve got puke all over my upholstery. What an asshole you are. This is leather. How the fuck am I going to get rid of the smell now.”
As he said it, he pushed down the electric button of the right front window, which slid silently down. A faint sea breeze caressed Fieno’s cheek, drying a rivulet of bile at the corner of his mouth. And that was the last thing he ever knew. The .38 caliber bullet pierced his cranium, dragging a puff of cerebral matter behind it, which trailed out over the Hummer’s passenger door.
Number Eight doused the headlights, opened the passenger door, and tumbled Fieno’s corpse out onto the dirt. He got back behind the wheel and raised the right-hand window. He put the Hummer into reverse and crushed Fieno’s body into the ground. A three-metric ton press to finish the job with a flourish. Then he turned on the courtesy light inside the cockpit. He observed the lake of vomit and blood that had spattered even the Hummer’s sun roof. He shook his head in vexation.
“Anyway, I was going to have it washed, this car.”
XXX
An ID card, miraculously found under a crushed shoe, made it possible to identify both of the corpses. The document belonged to Zuppa, Dario, AKA Paja, ex-convict, born in Rome on 9/3/1980. If that’s the way things were, given the fact that where you found Paja you inevitably also found Fieno, the other mortal spoils could not have belonged to anyone while still alive other than Scavi, Luca, AKA Fieno, ex-convict, born in Rome on 7/12/1981.
Otherwise, the crime scene was one huge mess.
Lashed by an implacable wind blasting in off the salt water, immersed in the murderous dankness of the autumn night, caught in the light of the lamps that illuminated the bare dirt of the Idroscalo, the white jumpsuits of RIS seemed to give life to a dance that was as clumsy as it was surreal.
Wrapped in their windbreakers, shivering insistently, Marco, Alba Bruni, and Lieutenant Gaudino from the Ostia Carabinieri station were battling the cold, trying to make heads or tails out of a crime scene compromised by a surge of incongruous tracks. But it was difficult, if not impossible, to find their way in that welter of footprints, filthy rags, cigarette butts of every type and shape, and construction trash.
There was only one witness: that of the illegal occupant of a local shanty. It was his dog, a likable mut with a rascally way about him, that had found the bodies about three in the morning. But concerning the murders, or really, the brutal murders, because it had certainly been an outright slaughter, the man had been unable to provide any useful evidence.
The only thing that was unmistakable, after a first visual examination of the corpses, was the presence of an SUV. Both Paja’s decapitated torso, and Fieno’s shredded body—the RIS technicians concluded while waiting for the autopsy—presented in fact clear marks of having been run over or in any case impacted and crushed by large automobile tires. That vehicle, was the subsequent and fairly obvious conclusion, could only have belonged to the killer or killers, and the two victims must have arrived aboard it. In fact, the black BMW registered to Dario Zuppa had already been found at the Ostia roundabout.
The two corpses on the ground were Rocco Anacleti’s hitters, as Malatesta explained to the prosecuting magistrate whose shift this was, and who had arrived at the Idroscalo after an hour or so.
“Paja and Fieno? But isn’t that a kind of pasta?”
Marco stared at Bruni. They both rolled their eyes, then they turned their gazes to this young prosecuting magistrate who had introduced himself by the name of Michelangelo de Candia. At the very most, he might have been thirty years old; he was tall and distinguished, with small eyeglasses and a carefully groomed, blonde goatee. An unequivocally musical singsong in his speech betrayed his southern birth. The son and grandson of magistrates, he had a head full of pandects, and absolutely no street experience. The umpteenth ball-buster to come along. Marco unloaded him on Alba with a few phrases of formulaic courtesy and indulged in another, pointless round of inspection. No more than fifteen minutes or so. He’d seen enough. And he needed to get out of that place in a hurry. The deceased Paja and Fieno notoriously belonged to the inner circle of the Anacleti clan, so this murder now belonged to the district anti-mafia directorate. Which meant: Setola, the magistrate who had ordered Marco dismissed from the force. Marco had no desire to cross paths with that idiot. The plan he had devised called for clandestine legwork behind the scenes and no open clash. The greatest possible caution and, when the time was right, rapid and unscrupulous action. It gave him an immense surge of pleasure to savor it in advance, that moment. The important thing, of course, was to make it happen.
He had just started over to his Bonneville motorcycle when, with a wailing siren and screeching brakes, an armor-plated Alfa Romeo Alfetta blasted onto the scene. Out of the rear door, which the driver had obsequiously hurried back to pull wide open, none other than Setola emerged. He must have spotted Marco during the ostentatiously brusque parking maneuver, because he strode toward him with a broad smile of false friendship.
“Colonel! What a pleasure to see you again. You were just leaving, I imagine . . . ”
Which, translated from the Setolese, was a way of saying: beat it, this is my investigation.
Marco nodded, responding with a faint, hypocritical smile—after all Setola wasn’t the kind of guy who could even detect certain subtleties—and picked up his helmet to put it on.
Michelangelo de Candia came over, accompanied by Bruni. The two investigators exchanged a fairly hostile glance.
“All right then, partner. Unless you have some objection, I’ll just keep working here,�
�� said Setola dismissively.
The other man eyed him skeptically.
“Has the district attorney already assigned you this investigation?”
Setola jerked, startled.
“What does that have to do with anything? It’s obvious, isn’t it? This is our case, it belongs to the anti-mafia.
“There’s only one thing that’s obvious here, partner,” de Candia retorted with determination. “I’m on duty and I’m running the investigation of this crime scene. If you want to keep me company, I have no problem with that.”
And here, with a nod to Bruni, he turned his back on the sharp cutting edge of the Rome district anti-mafia directorate and went back to his work.
Marco stood there relishing Setola’s angry frustration, then he put on his helmet and rode away on his motorcycle.
Well, well, well, we have a bad boy in town!
Could he have been wrong about de Candia?
Yes, he’d been wrong.
And he’d been completely wrong.
This became clear by mid-afternoon, when Michelangelo de Candia summoned him to his office, a cubbyhole stacked high with paper on the fourth floor of building C of the district attorney’s office, and politely handed him the report that, a few weeks ago, when it was first written, had been mocked and dismissed by the higher-ups.
“Did you write this stuff?”
“It has my signature, I believe.”
“It strikes me as interesting. It offers an interpretive key to recent events that might also come in handy in the investigation into the death of those two guys. The pasta chefs. Paja and Fieno.”
“Your colleagues don’t seem to see things the same way, Dottore.”
De Candia took off his little round glasses and placed his hands together, as if in prayer.
“Even the best of us get things wrong sometimes.”
Marco thought he detected a twinge of irony that he didn’t mind one bit. He decided to lay his cards out on the table.
He explained to the prosecuting magistrate, in the same ironic tone, that he owed it to that very same report that he’d been kicked out. Evidently, the idea of a gang war wasn’t considered compatible with the hoped-for outcome of that investigation.
“What about you?”
“What do you mean, what about me?”
“How did you react?”
“I went to the beach.”
“An excellent decision,” de Candia said with a laugh, “the iodine is good for the brain.”
Then the prosecuting magistrate suddenly turned serious.
“I’ve opened an investigation targeting parties unknown. I just signed an authorization for the ROS. What I’m saying is that I’d like you working beside me. Well, will you give me a hand, Marco?”
“Where do we start?”
“Are you familiar with the expression ‘carte blanche’?”
XXXI
The infrared security cameras that the Anacletis employed to keep an eye, day and night, on a vast urban swathe with Via Zumbo at its heart provided advance warning at around 9:00 P.M. that night of the onrushing procession of ROS squad cars. But those same cameras couldn’t prevent the damage that occurred. Those cameras did ward off the very worst, though—or at least so the Anacletis believed. As soon as they caught a whiff of cops on the way, the women of the clan hurried to the fireplaces that were always kept aflame, summer and winter alike, to burn a couple of kilos of cocaine.
The doors were knocked down with axe blows. The Carabinieri came in waving search warrants and shouting that they had a right to a lawyer.
With them was de Candia.
“This little courtesy call on the Anacleti family is something I really don’t want to miss,” he’d confided to Marco.
At that exact moment, another team was turning the Off-Shore and the homes of the Ostia crew upside-down and inside-out.
Coordinated operations. And violent ones.
Villa Anacleti was an immense embattlemented construction, embellished, on the upright structural pillars, by copies of Doric columns in polychrome Carrara marble. With the moon riding high in the night sky, it looked like something out of Arabian Nights, as filtered through the style of a Disney cartoon. On the parking area out front, as if it were some high-end auto dealership, there were at least a dozen SUVs, a Porsche Carrera, two Bentleys, a Jaguar, a Lamborghini Diablo, and countless other high-performance vehicles.
On the patio of the villa, dressed in a pair of red silk pajamas and with a pair of green velvet oriental-style slippers on his feet, Rocco Anacleti was wide awake, surrounded by an assorted array of loudly garrulous sisters, cousins, and grandchildren. The execution of Paja and Fieno had thrown him into a trance state, interrupted only by sudden explosions of rage. He had refused to change his clothing and had summoned his entire clan around him to announce unspeakably savage retaliation. When Colonel Malatesta handed him the search warrant, his pudgy face took on a gummy consistency. He tried to mutter something, but the colonel, accompanied by his men, headed straight back into the bedrooms.
It was a sort of Ali Baba’s cave. A triumph of carved marble, brasswork, damasks, and fine watches.
In Rocco’s bedroom, a ceiling mounted stem lamp, reminiscent of a bush full of fluorescent thorns, illuminated a giant king-sized bed covered with a heavy bright-orange quilt. Over the bed hung a wood carving in bleached oak. A small satyr contemplated his own immense and erect phallus.
The colonel recognized the hand of poor old Abbas. At one of the extremities of the boiserie, he felt a thickening in the slab. He pried it open with a gold fork he’d found in one of the vitrines in the living room.
It proved to be a hidden compartment, which gave up a folder full of tracings, floor plans and area reliefs, maps, lists of specialized earth-moving companies, scale models of intensive affordable housing, an enlarged copy of what appeared to be sheets of the municipal zoning plan for the western sectors of the city, between EUR and the sea.
Clutching that stack of papers in his hands, he went back into the living room, where Rocco Anacleti was sitting in an armchair, watching the Carabinieri come and go. When he saw the colonel, he started berating him.
“You haven’t found a fucking thing, isn’t that right?”
Malatesta walked over to him menacingly.
“Excuse me? What did you just say? Did I not hear you clearly?”
“I said you haven’t found a fucking thing, Carabiniere.”
“You think not?”
With a nod of the head, he gave two of his men the go-ahead to raise their axes and start splintering the cherry-wood wainscoting that lined one of the long ends of the immense living room.
De Candia raised an eyebrow. Marco shot him a reassuring glance: he knew what he was doing, de Candia should just trust him.
That’s when Rocco Anacleti lost it. He lunged at the two Carabinieri, kicking one of them in the back. He was pinned to the floor and, in a chorus of shouts of pain, handcuffed. Malatesta kneeled down and, with his face practically grazing the floor, pushed the papers he’d found under the nose of the patriarch of the Anacleti clan.
“And just what are these supposed to be, you dickhead? Eh? Have you started studying to become an architect? Didn’t you used to just be a thief and a pusher? Answer me, asshole. Why do you have these papers? What are you doing with them? Maybe if you answer me, you can help me figure out why they murdered your guys Paja and Fieno.”
“I don’t talk to cops. If you want, you can talk to my lawyer.”
Malatesta stood up and, turning to a guy in his early thirties who seemed to be a member of the clan and who had watched the scene, frozen to the spot, he gestured for him to come over.
“Who are you?”
“Anacleti, Silvio. I’m the nephew.”
“You can go ahead say the first na
me before the last name. Because I haven’t sent you to prison yet. And anyway, your uncle is right. You need to talk to a lawyer, because I’m taking you in for resisting arrest and insulting an officer.”
“I’ve already called Parisi. He’s on his way.”
“That’s better.”
Rocco Anacleti, in pajamas, slippers, and a loose tweed overcoat, was loaded into an ROS Subaru.
Malatesta used his cell phone to call Alba. In Ostia, the usual: a little hashish, no weapons.
Once again, they’d had the time to clean things up.
It wasn’t even eleven yet. Everything had happened very quickly. While his men were starting to inventory the material they’d confiscated, Marco told the prosecuting magistrate that they could consider that night’s work finished.
“Shall I have you taken home, Dottor de Candia?”
“So early? I don’t know about you, but I feel like listening to a little music. What do you say, you want to come with me?”
Sure. De Candia really was an odd duck, Marco said to himself. But as long as they were on the same side . . . And then, he concluded as he was telling him yes, he was curious to know just how far his strangeness extended.
De Candia took him to a little club in the historical center.
“The cellar is a little private space for friends,” he explained, “the proprietor is a friend and when I ask him he lets me use it.”
There were a dozen or so people of all ages, though for the most part in their thirties and forties. Bourgeois faces, quite respectable. De Candia introduced him as an old friend. He got him a cold beer and a table next to the upright piano. Then, accompanied by a burst of friendly applause, he started to play. So he was a musician, too. And a good one. With great composure and inspiration, de Candia dominated the instrument, alternating angry cascades of notes with pauses dense with an uncertainty that you might have called poetic. Marco recognized a couple of pieces: a perky version of Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight,” the anthem of the elite and slightly crazed masonic network of jazz musicians, followed by a bit of Abdullah Ibrahim and lots and lots of Michel Petrucciani. But all of it reinterpreted, revitalized, and personalized, in some cases to excess. A tour de force of character, power, and delicacy. The show lasted close to an hour. In the end, de Candia, to a shower of enthusiastic applause, joined him at the table.
Suburra Page 26