“I’m speechless!” Marco commented.
“I admit that this is what I would have wanted to do with my life, Colonel. Unfortunately, I was born into the wrong family in the wrong city, and so I’ve had to accept a few compromises.”
“I could teach a seminar on compromise.”
“But I’m not complaining. It’s fine the way it is. I do my job and when I can, I indulge in an evening out with my friends.”
More unfiltered craft beers arrived, accompanied by the inevitable platters of Sienese Cinta pork salami and mountain pasture cheeses. They talked about jazz, about the legendary bad temper and violent magnetism of Michel Petrucciani. A toast to jazz, then.
“To jazz!”
Marco’s cell phone vibrated. A text from Alice: “Even if you’re a perfect idiot, I still miss you.” He typed an impassioned response and emerged with a stupid smile.
De Candia studied him with his clear, ironic gaze.
“Is she pretty?”
“How the hell . . . ”
“Oh, you’re right,” he said, shifting nonchalantly to a more informal tone. “I might ask: is she interesting? Is she well-read? Is she sweet, feisty, sharp-edged, docile, intelligent, independent, or protective? There are twenty thousand adjectives to define the object of our desires, but we men always and inevitably come up with the same one: Is she pretty? Is she pretty? They’re right when they tell us that we’re limited and monomaniacal. You’re head over heels, aren’t you? I was watching you, earlier, while I was playing. That languid demeanor, especially during the most melodic sections. I’d say we have a romantic on our hands.”
“I wouldn’t want to be questioned by you,” Marco retorted.
“I’d like to meet her.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Marco replied, vaguely embarrassed.
De Candia cleared his throat and changed the subject.
“But you tell me: what on earth is a criminal like Rocco Anacleti doing with those subdivision plans? Don’t you wish you knew?”
XXXII
When Ciro Viglione asked him for the keys to the red Mercedes SLK, Dr. Temistocle Malgradi turned pale.
“There’s an inspection scheduled for today, Ciro.”
“Doc, I don’t give a fuck about that. I have to go out. And right away.”
“So what am I supposed to tell the cops?”
“Just invent something. Aren’t you a professor? Now, Professo’, come on, give me those keys.”
“Ciro, you shouldn’t push things too far. This would be the third inspection you’ve skipped. I wouldn’t want some over-zealous inspector to start gettings some strange ideas.”
“Nothing will happen, stop worrying, Professo’. In any case, if they start busting our chops, you just pay them off. There’s a little cash in the cabinet, the one to the right of the bed.”
But Temistocle Malgradi kept stalling. What if they send new personnel, let’s say, for a surprise inspection? They say that a new prosecuting magistrate has arrived in the district attorney’s office, a hipster from Lecce who’s got who knows what into his head. Wouldn’t it be better to put this off a little?
“Now you’ve busted my balls long enough, okay! The keys!”
The doctor put his hands together as if in prayer and finally spat out the truth.
“Ciro, don’t lose your temper . . . The Mercedes is in for repairs.”
“Eh?”
It had been a damned piece of bad luck. A really unfortunate coincidence. Temistocle had borrowed the car to make a good impression on a young girl working toward her degree, a spectacular beauty, a genuine rosebud, and on their way back from a lovely evening out, you know how these things go, a glass of wine too many, a sudden swerve at an intersection . . .
“But it’s just a scratch, eh, Ciro, and I swear to you that you’ll have it back just like new.”
Ciro stared at the chief physician. A flash of something glinted in his watery eyes. Malgradi shivered. He’d fucked up this time. Certainly, Ciro and the other guys needed him. Ciro did in particular, seeing that in his gilded suite in the finest clinic in Rome he was practically serving out his jail term free of charge, at the taxpayers’ expense. For that matter, everyone needed everyone else in the game they were playing, but still, Ciro was a stone criminal, and when you’re dealing with criminals you never really know.
But now Ciro had started laughing, and his eyes looked a little calmer.
“Not just like new, Doctor. New, period.”
“Ciro.”
“Ciro my ass! Tomorrow I want a new SLK. Red, no wait, this time I want it blue. And I want it parked downstairs. Right now, though, I’m in a hurry. What kind of car do you have?”
“You . . . I?”
“Do you see anyone else in here? Right now, Doc!”
With a sigh, Temistocle Malgradi held out the keys to his Audi Q7.
“Take care, Professo’.”
Half an hour later he was parking in the piazza in front of Samurai’s little two-story villa.
As always, the gate was wide open, there were no bodyguards in sight, and there were no security cameras. According to Samurai, a boss’s best defense is pure charisma.
“A couple of stray dogs who’ll shoot you in the back for a hundred euros are easy to find, Ciro. And once someone’s sent them to get you, any attempt to defend yourself is futile. The problem has to be taken care of at the root. You have to be powerful enough to nip in the bud even the thought of doing you any harm. Have I made myself clear?”
“Sure, why not, Samurai! But you just go on down to Casapesenna, and try telling them that! And then we can all have a nice fat laugh!”
Ciro Viglione had known Samurai for a lifetime, and he’d detested him for the same amount of time. His Japanese obsessions were intolerable. His attitude of superiority made him see red. And his diet of a constipated queer, well, that was enough to turn his stomach.
But he had to force himself to like Samurai.
Business demanded it.
And in business there are no such things as liking someone or disliking them. In business there is only coexistence.
Ciro Viglione was fifty years old, and for the past thirty years he had been traveling in business class through the underworld, cleverly picking his way through larger and smaller Camorra wars. As the pill-addled guagliuncelli exterminated each other with commendable vigor out on the street and underbosses stabbed one another in the back, he shifted from one side to another with agile nonchalance. Now he was the wise man, now he was the seething lunatic. He took the best from this one and that, never even grazed by a bullet, protected by his natural propensity for treachery and his innate street sense. When things got too hot for him in Naples, he’d moved bag and baggage to Rome, and there he had begun to prosper in the shadow of his mentor, Trentadenari. He’d gone into business with Libano’s boys, and when Trentadenari had decided to turn informant, selling human flesh by the pound in exchange for a bowl of lentils, he’d done his time behind bars in silence and dignity. When he got out he realized, to his surprise and above all to his infinite delight, that he was now the only Neapolitan of any heft left standing in Rome. Stitching his old alliances back together proved to be child’s play. Now he, Perri, and Samurai formed a sort of triumvirate, as Samurai had defined it. The man really never missed a chance to bust people’s balls. As if book learning had ever filled anyone’s belly.
At any rate, Rome belonged to them.
And that’s the way it had to stay.
Samurai came to meet him halfway, descending the white marble staircase with the step of an SS officer. Well, he was a Nazi after all, the asshole, wasn’t he?
He was wearing a loose black kimono, and when Ciro noticed the white scorpion stamped on the back, he couldn’t help but laugh.
“Samura’, look out, scorpions stin
g!”
“This one is tame,” the man retorted with the usual detached tone of voice. “And even if it tried, it wouldn’t live long enough.”
Ciro Viglione searched in vain through his limited arsenal for an adequate response, and finally just decided to drop it. On that terrain, there was no beating Samurai. Better to think about more serious things.
“I’m in a hurry, Samura’. What the fuck are you up to?”
“A good cup of tea tends to clear the brain.” Samurai cut the conversation short, and headed inside. Ciro followed him, reciting an imprecation over and over under his breath.
Samurai poured cold green tea from a carafe with a curious elongated shape.
“It’s called Gloria del Diamante,” he explained, “the Diamond’s Glory, one of the most refined products of the ancient glassmaker’s craft of Murano.”
Ciro Viglione wondered whether Samurai not only ate like a queer but was one. He refrained from any comment. That wouldn’t be a good idea. He knew a professional killer who had chosen to confess to twenty-five murders rather than admit to his own homosexuality.
“All right. But now can we talk, please?”
“There’s been a little unrest between Ostia and Cinecittà,” Samurai said in an icy tone.
“You call this a little unrest?” Ciro said, starting to get heated. “This is a historic clusterfuck! Dead people in all directions, shootouts, those fucking Carabinieri breathing down our necks. And you’re sitting here drinking this fucking green tea!”
“The situation is under control, Ciro.”
“Bullshit, Samura’. It seems to me that there are too many people around taking care of their own business instead of thinking about the welfare of one and all. You need to do something, and you need to do it fast.”
Samurai sighed. Ciro wasn’t entirely wrong.
He tried to explain to him that the problem still remained unchanged. Having to deal with primitives. Necessarily being forced to rely upon their savage force, reserving their control, let’s even call it, their manipulation, for yourself, and running the risk of unpredictable outbursts.
“Because in the final analysis, Ciro, we need these motley crews. They’re our labor. The proletariat from the street. We need to toss them a scrap now and again, and rein them in when they’ve run away with themselves. We can’t do without them. Unfortunately.”
Samurai seemed very sure of himself. With respect to him and Perri, Samurai had an advantage: he was a local. The indispensable indigenous player without whose decisive assistance no organization worthy of the name can seriously hope to sink roots in foreign soil. All the same, even he recognized that the street was seething. To what extent would Samurai be able to keep that street under control? Would his word be sufficient? No disrespect intended but frankly, at this point, Ciro was fucking sick and tired of all this charisma, as he put it.
“Samura’, listen to me: these are just words!”
“The deeds will follow.”
“What do you mean?”
“That I’ll put an end to it, all this unrest.”
“But how?”
“Once and for all.”
Okay, at least this was a concrete commitment. As long as he wasn’t just trying to stall for time. But, for that matter, everyone had the same interest in the game going well, they all had the same stake in this thing.
And Samurai, clearly, had something in mind.
“All right. But don’t take too long about it, okay?” Ciro said, at last, getting to his feet.
Samurai walked him down to the courtyard. Ciro called a taxi and gave the address.
Samurai pointed to the Audi.
“What about your car?”
Ciro told him the story of Malgradi.
“So now, we’re going to play a nice practical joke on the professor. You call up the Anacletis and tell them to make this car disappear. That way we’ll teach this asshole Malgradi to play tricks on me!”
“Does that strike you as an intelligent thing to do, Ciro?”
“Who the fuck cares if it’s intelligent or not! It’s a prank, Samura’. What, don’t you understand the word? Prank?”
Once he was alone, Samurai parked the Audi in the garage, then went down into the basement, lifted a couple of partition walls, and triggered the mechanism that released the spring of a tiny trapdoor concealed beneath a tile that was identical to all the others in the floor.
Inside was an oily rag, wrapped around his beloved Mannlicher.
Samurai knew that he would have to get rid of it.
He was sorry about that.
But it was time for the Mannlicher to let its song be heard once again.
XXXIII
De Candia had nailed the point neatly.
The plans that had been confiscated from Rocco Anacleti, with the cryptic annotations in the margins of stenciled maps, were perhaps the first piece of concrete evidence to surface since the slaughter had begun between Ostia and Cinecittà.
It didn’t require an expert to figure out that someone had a Great Project in mind.
But how did the Anacletis fit in? Their presence didn’t fit the picture.
Or maybe it justified it.
If a venerable old dynasty of thieves and pushers decides to go into real estate, it’s because it’s found a good reason to do so.
Marco questioned Rocco Anacleti.
“Well? What’s so strange about that? I want to build a beachfront villa. I can afford it, you know?”
Sure, a beachfront villa! Those maps covered a huge area stretching from EUR to the province of Latina, by way of Ardea, Pomezia, and Casalazzara with plenty of detailed illustrations of the Ostia coastline.
A villa. Or maybe, a city.
Rocco Anacleti building a city? And what if that was it?
An idea was starting to take shape. And it reeked of real estate speculation.
On the bottom left of every confiscated sheet of paper was the logo of Mailand & Partners. One of the most prestigious architectural studios in the world. They were working for the Anacletis, those illiterates from Romanina? And just for them?
He thought about asking Mailand & Partners about it directly. But he decided not to. Without a signed warrant, they would have claimed client privilege.
But a warrant was predicated on a criminal accusation. And, until proven otherwise, there had been no crime.
Still, the stench of something rotten was getting stronger.
Marco concentrated on the territory marked out on the maps. Ostia. He made phone calls, he ordered archived reports. Ostia. Six cases of arson along the Ponente coast in the past few months. He got in touch with Lieutenant Gaudino.
“Yes, I’d mentioned that to you, Colonel. They’re punishing the ones that don’t fall into line.”
But was it just part of a protection racket? Something didn’t add up. All of the bathing establishments that had been targeted by the arsonists were run on a state concession by social cooperatives. They’d been burned to the ground. And after the fire, they’d all lost their state concessions.
He asked for help from an old acquaintance who worked in the municipal offices. He was given access to the files that interested him. The concessions had all been conveyed to the same individual. Michele Lo Surdo. A legendary business accountant tangled up in a thousand murky deals: in point of fact, the number one consigliere of the Roman underworld.
The picture was starting to take shape.
Gaudino was wrong.
They were burning the bathing establishments to clear rights to the beachfront.
And they were clearing rights to the beachfront so they could begin construction.
And since not a leaf rustled on a tree in Ostia without the permission of Number Eight, Number Eight had to be part of this.
In that case,
why were the maps in the possession of the Anacletis?
Because they’d caught wind of the business opportunity and wanted in, and perhaps they’d been turned down and that had led to a gang war.
Or else, because they were in on the deal with the rest of them, only at a certain point things had gotten off balance and a gang war had erupted.
If the maps pointed in the right direction, then the entire area could be considered open for construction.
Marco pictured the scenario.
Millions of cubic yards of cement, no doubt. And a raging river of cash. Unless, without warning, the various Anacletis, Adamis, and Sales hadn’t found a philanthropical calling.
And in that case, was it plausible that Neapolitans and Calabrians weren’t already waiting in the wings?
To pass such a zoning plan would require the approval of a resolution by the city council, he reasoned.
He searched the official websites. Not a hint. There was no such resolution on the agenda. It wasn’t hard to figure out why: those directly interested were eager to avoid publicity. The resolution would pop up out of nowhere. And by the time it did, it would be too late to organize any opposition.
So why hadn’t it happened yet?
Because they hadn’t struck a final deal yet.
To put the final touches on a pact of that scale, a great many hungry mouths would have to be fed and a great many thirsts would have to be slaked.
An unquestioned authority would have to be brought to bear. No, make that two. One to control the street. The other to marshal the halls of power.
Who controlled the street? Samurai.
But the street was being rocked by a gang war.
Did that mean Samurai had failed? Or had he actually retired, the way people were saying?
Marco couldn’t believe that. People like Samurai never changed.
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