Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

  Alice couldn’t resist.

  “Then it’s true what people say. That you Carabinieri get along with the Fascists.”

  De Candia delicately put his hand on her forearm.

  “Forgive me, Alice. But if I were you, I’d try to be a little less cutting.”

  “Why? Because he’s a Carabiniere and you’re a prosecuting magistrate? Am I guilty of insubordination?”

  “Of course not. It’s just that I used to be like you. Then I understood at a certain point that if you think you know too much you know nothing. And you lose almost everything. It’s not enough to just read the way things work in some book.”

  Alice went back to needling Michelangelo.

  “And when did you have this revelation?”

  “In Milan, the day I found myself face to face with a merchant banker. I had the report open on the desk. And I was convinced that he was just going to confess.”

  “And instead?”

  “And instead he told me something that I’ve never forgotten. ‘You, Dottor de Candia, think that I know the meaning of what I do, and so you question me about it. You’re convinced that a banker is something other than what he is. I know nothing about what I sell, de Candia. I don’t know what the hell a derivative is, I don’t even understand interest rate swaps, much less collars. That’s stuff that some kid who’s good at math can do. The work I do involves people. All I’m trying to do is respond to their greed or desperation.’ In other words, what he told me was, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Alice dropped her gaze. Through the pub’s windows, Marco pointed out to de Candia the patch of light that could be seen in the distance.

  “Down there is Infernetto. It was an illegally built borgata—something between a quarter and a village. Like every other wall built in this part of town. First they amnestied everything. Then they sold them a dream. Rome just like Atlantic City. Casinos, ski slopes in the pine groves. Chairlifts. Malls every half mile. An orgy of merchandizing to make it look like something it’s not.”

  “And especially useful in terms of laundering dirty money,” Alice added.

  “A perfect cop commentary. Coppish, and yet, correct,” de Candia smiled, nodding.

  They left the Axa quarter, heading for the sea. It was almost two in the morning by now. A couple of shivering streetcleaners were loitering outside the porchetta foodtruck parked on one of the sides of the Ostia roundabout. Marco asked Michelangelo to pull over by the wharf of the marina. A few miserable sailboats could hardly fill the spectral void of wastefully empty slips. The skeleton in reinforced concrete of a tall, unfinished building loomed over them like a mournful ruin. They got out of the Renault 4 and started strolling. Marco lit a Camel.

  “Ostia had no need of this port. At least, not a port this size. Fiumicino is fifteen minutes away. But the important thing was to start to pour cement. Because a port can become a casino on the beach, because the reasons places are used for can change. Waterfront. It sounds good, right?”

  They got back in the car. Driving back up Via Cristoforo Colombo toward Rome, the Renault 4 turned into a nameless coplanar expanse of asphalt. An alleyway sunk in grim darkness, at the end of which something glittered, a surreal apparition that looked like the entrance to a circus. They stopped about a hundred yards short of the light source.

  “That’s La Caverna. Officially, a discotheque. In actual fact, a monument to the peace that the Anacletis had established with the Adami-Sales, and which now seems to have vanished in a puff of smoke,” Marco explained.

  “And what does the peace have to do with a discotheque?” asked Michelangelo.

  “Denis Sale had married an Anacleti woman. And together they ran this dive. Cocaine, hookers, slot machines. A marriage of interests that was designed to baptize a new equilibrium, shall we say, throughout the city. No more gang wars over clubs or restaurants. Instead, a salubrious new form of cooperation, where there would be room for the Calabrians and the Neapolitans, too. From the Café de Paris on Via Veneto all the way down to this shithole. Then Denis was left a widower and another tarantella began, evidently.”

  “It all sounds very persuasive,” said de Candia.

  “Open up a case file,” Marco urged him, “on acts connected with a construction project. I’ll draw up an official report. I can attach everything you need: not just the Anacleti maps, but architectural plans, sketches, feasibility studies, opinions of the superintendency, there’s even a draft regional law that concerns . . . wait a second . . . ah, ‘supplementary provisions in the domain of worship,’ in practical terms, authorization to build a healthy array of bed-and-breakfasts that will be run by priests. I’ll just say that I stumbled on it thanks to a confidential source.”

  De Candia interrupted him with a jerk of the head.

  “You think that the gang war between Ostia and Cinecittà is a result of this, don’t you?”

  “I’m sure of it. Some existing equilibrium must have been knocked silly. I don’t know why, and I intend to find out. But I do know that someone’s working to restore order and put things back the way they were. Usually, when there’s a lot of money at stake, the various groups bring in regulators. They need someone to keep the street in line, and they generally need a political sponsor, too.”

  “And you already know who they are, don’t you?”

  “As far as the political side goes, I’m in the dark. I don’t know anything about that side of things, I’m happy to admit it. But for the street, there’s only one man capable of putting things back on track.” Marco fiddled with his iPhone, then showed de Candia the picture that he’d sneakily snapped of Samurai before confronting him at the gas station on Corso di Francia. “Samurai.”

  “Does he have slanted eyes?” de Candia inquired in a blasé tone of voice. “It’s hard to say from these pictures.” Alice burst out laughing. She adored de Candia’s lightness and irony. The conversation turned frivolous. Alice said that she’d suddenly come down with a yen for something sweet. She knew a place, the best in town. The prosecuting magistrate stopped being a serious professional and begged her to take them there. Right away. Marco stuffed his cell phone in his pocket and tagged along after them, huffing in annoyance.

  By the time they got to San Basilio day was dawning. Via Luigi Gigliotti was deserted, even though the crumbling, sprawling tenement blocks of the occupied apartment houses—squats for as long as anyone could remember and lord only knew who squatted there—seemed to be quivering with some form of vigilant life. Which manifested itself with sudden apparitions of shadows on the interiors of the courtyards and the lobbies. Young men bundled up in dark heavy jackets, with wool watch caps pulled down over their heads.

  “Where the hell are we?” asked de Candia, disoriented.

  “Half way around the beltway to the northwest,” Alice replied.

  “Good. Now I know less than I did before.”

  “We’re at Rome’s Supermarket,” said Marco.

  “Supermarket? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “This is the biggest drug-dealing marketplace in the city, my friend. A supermarket for uppers and downers at discount prices. Let’s just say that this is the Anacleti outlet store,” Marco continued.

  “Wait, Alice, weren’t you hankering after some pastries?” de Candia broke in.

  “That’s right,” she said. “That’s why we’re here. Because right here, aside from the cocaine, the hashish, and the heroin, there’s also a little hole in the wall that sells the best cornetti pastries in the city.”

  She pointed to an anodized aluminum door that opened out onto the sidewalk on Via Recanati.

  Enveloped in a dizzying scent of yeast, they stepped carefully down a steep staircase, which led into the underground heart of a tiny pastry shop with a close-packed bakery. Working in front of two large aluminum baking ovens, two young Maghrebis were greasing giant baking p
ans while a corpulent man in his early sixties kept an eye on them with an apparently distracted demeanor. Alice threw her arms around him, as if she were hugging her father.

  “This is Mario. Mario, meet Marco and Michelangelo.”

  “Mhm, they look a lot like cops to me . . . no offense, eh! Alice, don’t tell me that you’re dating pigs these days,” smiled the pastry chef.

  Marco blushed. Michelangelo decided to play along.

  “Let’s just say that Alice used the night to test us out. You never want to buy a pig in a poke.”

  “And how come you’re around these parts?”

  “Just taking a ride. Michelangelo doesn’t know Rome very well.”

  “It’s true,” de Candia said, throwing his arms wide.

  “This isn’t Rome. This isn’t anything anymore.”

  Mario told his three visitors about the latest murders in the quarter. A fifteen-year-old punk who’d bled to death after a brawl. A couple of pushers. A guy from Torraccia—the new section of the San Basilio neighborhood, outside the beltway—who had just said a couple of words too many at a self-service gas station.

  “The place is full of rabid stray dogs,” said Mario, shaking his head as he filled a cardboard takeout tray with pastries and doughnuts: cornetti, bombe, and ciambelle. “They’re coked out of their minds. Dawn to dusk. And they think they’re the bosses around here. But they don’t count for shit. They sell drugs for Anacleti and think they’re God almighty. Too bad, because they’re just a bunch of penniless assholes. But I told you before. This isn’t Rome anymore. Even the birds have gone wrong. The other day, out front, a seagull ate a cat alive.”

  They went back out into the street with the 7:30 morning sun peeping out overhead.

  Michelangelo turned thoughtful.

  “If you ask me, you’re right on the money, Marco. But what evidence do I have to proceed? A project, as long as it’s just on paper, is a phantom project. Bring me evidence, solid, concrete proof. Then we’ll act. But not till then.”

  Alice yawned. Her eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, but she’d learned a great many things during that strange night. And a number of her certainties, which until an instant before she had considered as solid as granite, were now beginning to give way. She was forced to admit that the state, the structures of power, the system, the caste, or whatever you wanted to call the entities to which those two belonged, couldn’t actually be considered merely an obtuse and compact mass against which nothing was legitimate but a wall of resolute NO’s. In a word, she began to feel that she actually trusted Marco and Michelangelo.

  “You know,” she said, “we ought to put this stuff online. All hell would break out, and someone would make a break out into the open. Let’s toss a rock in the pond, and see what fish come up to the surface.”

  “An unorthodox, dangerous, and thoroughly illegal idea,” de Candia said brusquely.

  The idea was rejected out of hand.

  XXXVI

  This time Number Eight had pulled the fuck-up of his life. Uncle Nino hadn’t slept a wink. Back and forth he paced in his cell. Back and forth. In the morning, he summoned counselor Parisi for a meeting in prison. And to conceal his agitation, he raised his voice and spoke confidently. He told him that Cesare was untouchable, that no one must lay a finger on him. He admitted that, of course, what Cesare had done was indefensible, and that he’d fucked up not once, but three times. That his wild behavior was threatening to ruin everything they’d worked for. That in any other situation, for such idiotic behavior, there could no punishment other than death.

  “But he’s my nephew, counselor, blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh. He’s like a son to me. We need to resolve this thing among ourselves.”

  “Rocco Anacleti is out of his head, Uncle Nino.”

  “I believe you, and he has his reasons . . . I saw him, you know, he came through here. He was in pretty bad shape. But do something for me. Go pay a call on Denis, he’s a smart boy. He needs to give a couple of hundred thousand euros to the families of those two unfortunates. Then let the Anacletis know that if they’re willing to overlook this thing we’re willing to increase their percentage by twenty-five percent.”

  “If we want to be able to bring it to an end, we need to talk to the others, too,” Parisi observed, pragmatically.

  “Then you inform them. Talk to Rocco, talk to Ciro, talk to Samurai, talk to Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, but do it fast. And tell Cesaretto that he needs to pay, and not to show his face around town for a while.”

  “All right, Uncle Nino. Certainly, what you’re asking me to do doesn’t exactly fall into the realm of the legal profession . . . ”

  Uncle Nino flew into a rage. Ah, now he was suddenly remembering his professional ethics, this legendary human nostril, this inveterate whoremonger, now he was suddenly reluctant, after all these years that he’d showered him with gold and white powder.

  “I was just trying to say that this isn’t going to be a walk in the park, Uncle Nino,” Parisi hastened to explain.

  Uncle Nino could tell what was coming next: as always the bloodsucker in a black lawyer’s robe was going to ask for cash. It was just a matter of money. That’s where they always wound up, these men without honor who were happy to hide their shameless filth behind this dirty pair of underwear they called the law.

  “All right. Tomorrow I’ll wire you money on the account you know about.”

  “Grateful as always, Uncle Nino.”

  That same evening, Parisi went to the Off-Shore. Denis and Robertino told him that Number Eight had taken a few days off. A fool, but certainly not a suicidal fool, Parisi thought to himself, and asked Denis to take him to the house at Campo di Carne, in the feudal holdings of a Calabrian family federated with the Perris, where Number Eight had gone to hide out with Morgana.

  The lawyer explained the situation while Morgana, bare-breasted, smoked crack through a bottle covered with a lilac rag. When he realized that the lawyer was asking him for two hundred large, as a gesture of good will, Number Eight, his eyes bugging out of their sockets, burst into a hearty guffaw.

  “You want me to pay them? But those two pieces of shit ought to indemnify me, if anything; they were trying to kill me, goddamn them to hell. You know the legal term for what I did, counselor? Legitimate self-defense, is what it’s called.”

  Parisi pointed out that it was an order from Uncle Nino and the young man instantly drew in his horns. He assured Counselor Parisi that he’d take care of it in the next twenty-four hours.

  Encouraged by that initial success, Parisi summoned to his office the remaining Anacletis not yet in handcuffs. After listening to his proposition, the gypsies expressed a certain willingness to consider terms. Thirty percent, though, specified Silvio, one of the countless nephews in that vast clan, a young man you could talk to. Thirty percent, though, would be preferable. And in any case, before making any commitments, they’d have to check with Rocco.

  “Just a few more days of patience and I’ll have him out of there,” Parisi reassured them.

  The Anacletis retreated in good order, muttering their incomprehensible gypsy litanies.

  The message for Ciro Viglione and Rocco Perri was entrusted to Dottor Temistocle Malgradi. The Neapolitan and the Calabrian met at Villa Marianna. They were both thoroughly sick and tired of that senseless mess, and they said they were ready to sign on for any solution that would really restore peace: in part because Uncle Nino, having shown himself willing to shoulder his nephew’s debt, had proven that he was an intelligent man.

  Since the bureaucratic procedures involved in springing Rocco out of jail were taking longer than expected—the case was in the hands of this de Candia, a Red toga, you know what I’m talking about—Silvio Anacleti went to the Hotel Rome, as the prison was called, and over the course of a tempestuous interview, managed to persuade Rocco to come ar
ound to the agreement.

  At the end of a week, that new pact had been underwritten.

  But all that optimism was unjustified.

  There was someone who still hadn’t expressed his opinion.

  Samurai.

  In response to Parisi’s repeated solicitations, he had put up an incomprehensible silence. And over the last two days, just as the deal seemed to be coming to fruition to universal satisfaction, he had stopped answering his Skype calls.

  The lawyer wondered whether he ought to inform the others of this development. He decided not to because he was already afraid he had ventured too far, and because he imagined that Samurai, in his notoriously far-sighted prudence, was not about to array himself against all the others.

  No one had yet understood just what kind of man Samurai really was.

  Finally sure of himself, certain that the storm had died down, Number Eight took up residence at the Off-Shore and, to celebrate his victorious return, organized a memorable private party. So memorable that around four in the morning, with a gusting north wind, he walked out into the street all alone to try and wear off the rivers of alcohol and the fumes of the drugs. He’d barely taken a few steps, and had just lit up an ordinary tobacco cigarette, when he saw a white Audi Q7 pull up next to him. The smoked-glass passenger-side window rolled down and a familiar voice called his name.

  “Cesare!”

  Max was leaning toward him, with a friendly smile stamped on his usually gloomy face. Instinctively, his hand went for the pistol that he kept stuffed down the belt of his trousers, the muzzle propped against his buttock.