Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

  “What the fuck do you want? It’s all over, isn’t it?”

  Max got out and walked over with his hands in the air. Number Eight searched him. He was unarmed.

  “Samurai wants to see you.”

  “But couldn’t he get up off his ass and come to the party? I invited the two of you, you know.”

  “You know what he’s like. He doesn’t like a lot of noise.”

  “All right, but I’m pretty stoned right now. Tell him to swing by tomorrow.”

  “Whatever you think best,” Max sighed, as he headed back to his SUV, “I’ll just tell him you’re not interested in the deal.”

  “What deal? What the fuck are you talking about? Hold on!”

  “A big deal, Cesare. A metric ton of cocaine.”

  “Now you tell me. And just why would Samurai have suddenly remembered I even exist?”

  “Because the load is coming in by ship and this is the landing point, which if I’m not mistaken, is territory that belongs to you.”

  Number Eight puffed up like a peacock. That’s right! At last things were coming back to normal. What a good idea it had been to whack those two pieces of shit. Now everyone knew who Number Eight was, and who they were going to have to deal with. Even Samurai had decided he had to take him into consideration. If he wanted to import his shit, Samurai knew that he would have to deal with him. Samurai was asking for his help. Uncle Nino would burst with happiness when he heard.

  “All right. And just where is Samurai?”

  “I’ll take you to him.”

  Along the way, he amused himself by provoking Samurai’s loyal shield bearer.

  “So tell me something, Max, is this story about Pigna the truth? The one where Samurai is supposed to have cut off his head with his big old sword?”

  “That’s the way I’ve heard it went.”

  “Thanks. I’ve heard the same thing. But neither one of us was actually there, were we? And from what I’ve heard the moniker of Samurai was given to him by Dandi when they first met in prison, and your boss was nothing more than a punk kid.”

  “Samurai isn’t my boss, Number Eight. Men don’t have bosses.”

  “Oh, really? But still you follow him around like a little lapdog.”

  “Samurai is my maestro. But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh hey, philosopher, do me a favor. Forget about it.”

  Samurai was waiting for them on the Capocotta beach, in the dunes. It was cold, terribly cold, but Samurai, in his inevitable black suit, hands in his pockets, face bare, seemed indifferent to the weather, the cutting wind, the roar of the surf and the rising tide, which carved, foaming, into the sandy shore scattered with soaked wood, bleached planks, the shells of dead crustaceans, and wet plastic bags.

  Perhaps, for an instant, the thought that he might have walked into a blind alley flickered in Number Eight’s drug-blurred mind. If he’d pulled out the gat in that moment, he might still have been able to emerge alive. But why go to all that trouble, after all: if they wanted to get him, they could always do it at the exit of the Off-Shore, they could wait in ambush near his apartment house on Piazza Gasparri, certainly. For that matter, though, wasn’t there an agreement? Who the fuck was this Samurai to think he could go up against everyone? To behave like a coward, at a moment like this, meant losing face.

  And so Cesare Adami strode brashly up to the figure that stood motionless among the dunes.

  “Well, Samura’, what about this metric ton of shit?”

  Samurai spoke to Max, ignoring what he’d said.

  “Max, if you’d excuse us for a moment . . . Cesare and I need to talk.”

  Max was baffled. Samurai had told him that he was well aware of the agreement, but that he wanted to talk it over man to man with Number Eight.

  Samurai had asked Max to drop him off on the beach three, maybe four hours ago. He’d stayed there all that time, waiting. Max had no idea what he intended to do. Samurai rarely offered explanations, and the few times he did, it was impossible to take his words literally: you had to interpret them. And now why was he walking away? Maybe he was putting him to some kind of test. Maybe he wanted him to stay. Was he asking him to disobey?

  “I’m going to stay right over here.”

  “That’s your choice,” Samurai commented, tersely.

  Number Eight had had enough of that minuet. What were the two of them, fiancés? I’m willing to bet that Samurai . . . and in fact no one had ever seen him with a proper, regular piece of pussy . . . the image of the icy Nazi copulating with the young philosopher brought a burst of laughter to his lips.

  “Hey Samurai, it’s getting sort of late, if you don’t mind . . . ” he wheezed at last, once he’d managed to recover a minimum of composure.

  Samurai pulled his hands out of his pockets, locked arms with him, and set off toward the water’s edge.

  “You see, Cesare, there are three components that make a man. A man worthy of being called a man, I mean to say. And these are heart, guts, and brains.”

  “Oh, sure, sure, I get that, but what about this shipload of cocaine?”

  “The Arabs, when a son is born to them, call him ‘my walking guts.’ I could explain the meaning of the metaphor to you, but I doubt you’d understand it . . . in fact, I’m sure you wouldn’t understand it.”

  “Samura’ . . . ”

  “Hold on, just hold on a second. The heart, well you can imagine for yourself what the meaning of that is. Daring, courage, generosity. All positive qualities, but which alone don’t make a man, any more than guts do. Because of all the qualities that a man must possess, the most important is brains.”

  “Samurai, excuse me . . . ”

  Samurai stopped and stared him in the eyes. That reptilian gaze sent shivers down Number Eight’s spine, it was a magnet that he couldn’t resist.

  “Unfortunately,” Samurai resumed, this time with a hint of sadness in his voice, “you’re devoid of all these qualities. You have no guts, because you can shoot but then you immediately run away and hide for fear that the mischief you’ve done is going to be discovered and punished. You have no heart, because you can shoot, yes, but from behind, and you’ll never have the courage to look your victim in the eyes. And above all, you have no brains, because you shoot at random, you shoot before thinking through the consequences. And that’s a bad thing, Cesare, a very bad thing.”

  Number Eight understood that things were going sideways, fast, and he tried to get his hand onto his weapon. He found the muzzle of the Mannlicher pointing right between his eyes. Samurai pulled the .357 magnum revolver out of Number Eight’s belt and pocketed it.

  “Samurai, I’m protected by Uncle Nino. If you touch me, Uncle Nino is going to have your heart on a plate. You and that other youngster you take with you everywhere you go.”

  “Get down on your knees.”

  “Hey Samurai, come on, cut it out. I’ll just forget about you, and you can forget about me.”

  “On your knees, I said!”

  Number Eight slipped on the wet sand and fell.

  “I’ll give you half of my end, Samurai. Seventy-five percent. I’ll give you everything, everything, I tell you!”

  “Do you see how limited you are?” Samurai sighed. “Even at a moment like this. On the threshold of the supreme reckoning . . . all you think about is money.”

  “What the fuck, Samurai!”

  Cesare Adami started crying. Samurai shook his head. All of that suffering, all of it, basically, useless, since what had to be done had already been decided, only irritated him. But there was still something he needed to say. To make sure the lesson was exemplary.

  “I’ve known so many others just like you . . . One of them was your father, you know, a guy who stuck his dick places it wasn’t meant to go, who thought it was fun to torture women, the one who
later gave the guards blowjobs . . . We executed him. It was what needed to be done. Back then,” Samurai concluded in a whisper, “we still believed that there was something resembling justice. Our kind of justice.”

  “Samuraaa’ . . . ”

  A gust of wind carried off the echo of the shot.

  A few yards away, Max had watched the whole scene. From his location, he’d been unable to hear what was said, but the essence of it was very clear.

  That wasn’t a punishment.

  That was death.

  Samurai had given him the freedom to choose. Like a good father.

  And he had been the one who’d decided to stay.

  He’d had all the necessary elements to make his decision.

  And he’d decided.

  He had never killed, up until that moment.

  By staying at Samurai’s side, he’d done the right thing.

  When Number Eight fell onto the sand, Max stirred from his trance.

  Rapid convulsions were shaking Cesare Adami’s body.

  It’s horrible, thought Max. He stepped a short distance away to vomit.

  Samurai walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s the shadow line, Max. There’s no coming back from here. Help me to break down the weapons. Then we’ll throw them in the sea. Their task is complete. Yours has just begun.”

  XXXVII

  Arms crossed, legs braced wide in the sand of Capocotta, Marco Malatesta watched as the attendants of the mortuary service of AMA, the municipal garbage collection agency, lifted Adami’s corpse and eased it into the zinc casket which would be taken to the Institute of Legal Medicine. He’d been killed by a single bullet. Fired right between the eyes. But the projectile that had devastated his cranium, as had become clear immediately, since there was no exit wound, was still in the victim’s body.

  The prosecuting magistrates Setola and de Candia both rushed to the scene of the crime, each with his own little investigative squad following in his wake. A surreal scene. It made you want to roll on the ground laughing, only this was about a gang war like nothing Rome had seen in years. And a gang war it was, even the ineffective Setola had been forced to acknowledge the fact. In fact, given the brash confidence with which he jawed on about it, you’d think he had been the most tenacious proponent of a theory that, in fact, until just a few hours ago, he regularly ridiculed.

  Beneath the sardonic gazes of Marco and Michelangelo, Setola devoted himself to his favorite pastime: issuing contradictory and largely nonsensical orders in all directions in a commanding voice. But there was little to laugh about. The slaughter seemed endless.

  Marco had just lit his umpteenth cigarette when he received a phone call. Rapisarda wanted to see him. Immediately. He exchanged a nod of farewell with de Candia and headed off.

  The Pisacane barracks stood at the far end of Viale di Tor di Quinto, a venerable old boulevard of the meretricious profession, where generations of adolescent males had fantasized about the streetwalkers, lit up garishly by rustic little bonfires known as focaracci. The last time Marco had seen the barracks was on television. In that period, he was on a mission. Together with a priest, a Coptic Christian from Egypt, he was trying to rescue from an atrocious fate fifty Eritrean refugees who were rotting in shipping containers buried in the scorching Libyan desert. He was battling against the local bandits, larger powers that were worried chiefly about not upsetting delicate balances of power, and his own government. From a news report on Al Jazeera that he’d managed to pick up on a TV set, in a ramshackle hut where he rested, exhausted after a long day of fruitless efforts, he had experienced his final and definitive humiliation as a Carabiniere and as an Italian. On a stage set up at the center of the barrack’s equestrian track, in a singularly obscene chromatic symphony, with the Italian tricolor embracing the banner of the Libyan Jamahiriya, Muammar Gaddafi, dressed in a white kaftan, had harangued for forty minutes the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, eight hundred select high muckety-mucks of the earthier Italian governing class, and the Carabinieri of the fourth mounted regiment. They were drawn up in dress uniform for an equestrian exhibition in honor of that bloodthirsty dictator and the second anniversary of the Italy-Libya Friendship Treaty. That towelhead Gaddafi had decided to explain that his Italian friends would guarantee him five billion euros a year to prevent Europe from becoming black Africa. Those were the exact words he had used. Black Africa. Unless you want me to inundate the Mediterranean Sea with the desperate unwashed of the world’s great South, pull out your wallets. Forget about liberating Eritrean refugees. The international world order wanted them dead, those poor wretches. They were to be sacrificed on the altar of prosperity. The best way to get them out of the first world’s hair was if they were dead. Of course, in the grandstands where the vested authorities sat, there was a constant, collective nodding of heads. And the complacent nodding heads upon which the television cameras had lingered the longest belonged not only to Italy’s cabinet ministers, arms dealers, and bankers, but also that of General Rapisarda, His Excellency the General of the Carabinieri Corps and Commandant of the Custoza Division. The host and master of the house for that obscene carnival sideshow. The man who, as the guard at the front gate reminded him, was now impatiently waiting to see him.

  After an hour spent in the waiting room, he was ushered into the sancta sanctorum. Rapisarda, bent over a desk cluttered with silver baskets overflowing with Perugina candies and Venchi torroncino nougats, pretended he had been caught unawares in the midst of drafting who knows what sensitive set of notes. The Colonel’s stentorian “At your orders, sir” became a sharp salute to the general’s combover. Without bothering to look up from the sheet of paper upon which he continued scribbling indecipherable chickenscratch, Rapisarda invited him to take a seat. At least two minutes of silence ensued, which Marco took great care not to interrupt. Until, at last, Rapisarda took the initiative.

  “We meet again, Colonel.”

  “It’s an honor, General.”

  “You look like you’re in shape, Colonel.”

  “As do you, General.”

  “You’re too kind, Colonel. Do you have any idea of the reason you were asked here?”

  “Frankly no, I don’t, General, sir.”

  Rapisarda’s voice grew in intensity, the intonation becoming harsher. The skirmish was ending, the full-fledged duel was beginning.

  “What the hell is going on in Rome, Colonel?”

  “A war, General, sir. And I’m afraid that this time we won’t able to pretend nothing is happening.”

  Rapisarda was left speechless. That was a provocation. An open provocation. The very threshold of insult and defiance. What had gotten into his head?

  Rapisarda’s desktop landline blinked. The general lunged at the phone.

  “I’m not taking calls from anyone! Ah, I understand . . . well, put him through . . . My dear, dear Dottore . . . ”

  Marco listened to the conversation in spite of himself. And he did his best to keep from laughing. The “dear, dear Dottore” was a powerful producer from the television network. He was inviting Rapisarda to appear on a talk show about the escalation of criminal activity in Rome. The general immediately put himself at the man’s full disposal. The two men came to an agreement about how to position in the TV studio the scale topographic model that would serve for the reconstruction of the execution of Number Eight, and discussed exactly how to shape the summary of the case: but please, Rapisarda implored him, no more about this Pasolini.

  Rapisarda went back to focusing on his irritating underling.

  “You’re just testing my patience, Malatesta. You and that prosecuting magistrate, a Communist judge, obviously.”

  “No disrespect intended, but . . . ”

  “Don’t you dare interrupt me! I have to provide answers. I owe that to the country. Do you know that with t
he death last night in Capocotta we’re at five murders? Five murders! Did you read what the newspapers wrote after the Idroscalo? A ‘Pasolini-style’ execution. What the fuck! Shut up, don’t speak! Gang war! You’re talking about a gang war. All right. Let’s admit it. Four bandits firing at random at four other bandits. Let’s catch them and put an end to it. That’s what the public is demanding that we do, by all that’s holy!”

  “The situation is more complicated than that,” Marco put in drily, “and the scenario is decidedly much more complex.”

  “Again? What are you doing now, Colonel, trying to tell me that we’re about to stumble upon some nice fat Masonic Lodge? Say, the P5, or the P6? The latter-day Magliana Gang?”

  Rapisarda started laughing to himself, while Malatesta stared at the tuft of hair that was clogging the general’s right ear and the array of colorful medals that studded the chest of his uniform.

  As quickly as it had begun, the general’s laughter stopped short.

  “Have a good day, Colonel. And give my regards to de Roche.”

  Malatesta snapped to attention.

  “Ah, one last thing, Colonel. A detail, perhaps. I’ve heard that you’re in contact with certain circles that are . . . how to put it . . . subversive? Antagonistic? I want to believe that it’s vicious gossip and nothing more. But don’t make me think otherwise. Good day, Colonel. And forgive me if I haven’t even offered you an espresso, but I already had two while waiting for you.”

  Malatesta shut the door behind him. He thought back to the face of Gheddafi, upon whom NATO was about to rain down an inferno of explosives and flame. He thought back to the expression on the face of the squad leader as he presented arms to the dictator.

  To hell with him.

  He hurried over to Alice’s place, and she was surprised to see him in such a foul mood. She, in contrast, was beaming with joy. A famous rock singer had asked her to get his rather antiquated website back into shape. A job that paid, and paid pretty well, too! And most important of all, an ethically compatible job: the rock star was well known for his commitment to animal rights, environmentalism, civil rights, and so on.