Jabba promised. Jabba was a refined politician. A promise, as we know, is the future, but in politics the future and the past don’t even exist. In politics the only thing that exists is the present.
Jabba underestimated Malgradi. When it came to matters of political promises, the Honorable considered himself to be unbeatable. Now he was looking for consensus, this jumped-up Fascist who until just a short while ago was serving as a pallbearer for his bomb-throwing comrades. Consensus. I’ll create consensus for you, you little asshole.
And in the end, you’ll no longer be able to tell me no.
Malgradi forced himself to show some pride. From one day to the next, he gave up cocaine and sluts, because there are times when you need to be clear-minded above all, and he launched his campaign of acquisitions.
Because when friendly fire is about to do you in, that’s the time to extend a hand of friendship to the enemy.
He identified three minority-party councilmen, two old hacks nearing the end of their careers, without any hopes of reelection, and a lusty young political climber who, in his furious, elbowing progress had so alienated his party that it had just kicked him sideways into city government. Another politico with no future, excellent fertile soil in which to sow seeds.
He started working them.
He explained what the Great Project was.
“We’ve heard all about it,” they replied, at first, “and we don’t like the rivers of cement.”
“Then I’ll help you learn to like them.”
A couple of dinners at La Paranza and free servicing from several of the most noteworthy members of his fleet of whores softened up their initial attempts at resistance. A few crisp high-denomination banknotes unleashed a sudden interest in the “social benefits” of the operation. The commitment to enlightened and profitable business practices put down in black and white in front of a notary won them over to the cause.
On progressive blogs and local magazines think pieces began to sprout that attacked Jabba. Already a target of Communist propaganda for the deeds of his misguided youth, the old Fascist became the subject of increasingly violent attacks for his opposition to that Project which, even though it had been flagged by certain agent provocateurs as Evil Incarnate, would actually produce thousands of good jobs. Obviously, in the most rigorous respect for the environment and the letter of the law.
The campaign spread over local radio stations and websites, emerging eventually in the news pages of Il Messaggero, and from there ricocheted onto the leading national networks. And when an article appeared on the front page of the most respected publication of the progressive bourgeoisie under the byline of a respected economist, who indicated in no uncertain terms that social housing was “the intelligent Keynesian response to the economic crisis,” Jabba finally lost it and openly confronted Malgradi, employing every bit of his traditional Fascist plain talking.
“What the hell kind of ideas have you got into your head, you fucking asshole?”
“You wanted consensus? Now you have it!”
“What are you talking about? You’re fucking crazy. But believe me, I’m crazier than you.”
“No, at the very least you’re handicapped. I figure that with all the holy water you sprinkle over yourself to show off to your little friends, the priests, you’ve wound up waterlogging your brain.”
“Malgradi, you’re done for.”
“Listen up and listen good, asshole. Tomorrow three opposition councilmen are going to present an item to be tabled, a request to immediately schedule debate and subsequent vote on the Great Project. That was what you wanted, isn’t it? Bipartisan consensus. What are you going to do? Or rather, what are you and your people going to do? Are you in, or do I have to destroy your reputations once and for all?”
Jabba turned pale. Malgradi paused for a moment to savor his rival’s debacle, then he laid out the scenario.
“At least half of the councilmembers on the left are going to fall into line immediately. The others will follow soon enough. There will be negotiations. We’ll slip in a few variants, a couple of benches, half a dozen plane trees, a nursery school for the kids, the kind of thing that these dickheads love so much. You’ll deliver a nice hot speech about the importance of producing jobs at a time of economic crisis, and the trade unions will be good as gold—”
“But there’s still going to be a few people against it,” Jabba ventured, just to avoid surrendering at the first assault.
“Of course there will. There’s always someone who’ll bust your balls. But it’ll just be the usual losers. We’ll send the riot police around, a few swings of the billy club, and raus, we’ll send them all home. Have I made myself clear, comrade?”
Jabba capitulated. One after the other, the renegades, in a somber, hopeful procession, came and paid homage to Malgradi, who bestowed upon them, with magnanimous equanimity, handshakes, sage advice, and kicks in the ass.
The matter was brought up for debate. And the vote was set for November 14.
Malgradi celebrated the end of Ramadan at La Chiocciola with three girlfriends. He had required them to wear wigs, each a different color: red, white, and green. So that it would be perfectly clear that this was the holiday commemorating an Italy that never surrenders, a healthy nation that refuses to cry over its sorrows, an Italy that couldn’t care less about the spread. In a burst of generosity, he handed a hundred euros to the Albanian porter. But when that loser came out with his tired old litany, asking when he’d get his citizenship, Malgradi told him to go to hell.
Kerion Kemani took it without blinking and decided, at that exact instant, that Malgradi was going to pay for that.
When counselor Parisi gave him the news, Samurai, usually so calm and composed, couldn’t conceal a surge of genuine surprise. He had clearly underestimated the Honorable Malgradi. The gears were starting to mesh again, things were starting to move. Still, he couldn’t seem to shake that vague sense of impending doom that had been pestering him for days. Could he really have been so spectacularly off-base? No. Not a chance. Things were still bound to end badly. Samurai had too much confidence in his nature as a superman not to prepare a backup plan.
And so he gave Parisi precise instructions that left the lawyer flabbergasted. Samurai had become an bona fide pessimist.
“But why should it all go so horribly wrong, excuse me?”
“I don’t recall having hired you to ask questions.”
“As you wish. Ah, I’d almost forgotten. Tonight there’s going to be a little party at a restaurant that belongs to a friend of Temistocle’s. We’ll all be there, the Anacleti clan, the Honorable, Ciro, Perri. And of course, a few girls.”
“You know that I detest group sex.”
“But you’re supposed to be the guest of honor, Samurai, after all it’s all your doing that—”
“Time to stop wagging your tongue, Counselor.”
Samurai shuttered his apartment and went to stay with Shalva, in Trevignano.
Marco Malatesta and Michelangelo de Candia learned of the upcoming city council vote with a blend of rage and helplessness. They were both too pragmatic to labor under any illusions. The Great Project was going to be approved, and they had no way of stopping it. The investigation had run aground with the confiscation of Runa. Max, Farideh, Tito Maggio, who had all invoked St. Denial during the questioning, availing themselves of their right to remain silent, were the ideal guilty parties in a major cocaine-trafficking ring.
But the matter went no further.
Public opinion had been been skillfully manipulated, or perhaps it was distracted by other matters. There was no evidence linking the Great Project with the murders.
If de Candia dared to open criminal proceedings, even if it were under a John Doe heading, establishing grounds for indictments, he would be roundly reviled as an enemy of the people. A wingnut. What possible rea
son could the district attorney’s office have to go after people who were working to provide bread and jobs to a city that had been so badly hit by the recession? It was hardly a criminal offense to build housing and port facilities. Who would believe him if he tried to explain that what this was going to lead to would be corruption, not expansion, slavery, not good jobs? In fact, he’d look like lunatic raving on a street corner. Now they even knew the name of the operation’s political sponsor: Malgradi, whom Alice had described as an inveterate whoremonger. But the Italians were notoriously inclined to go easy on everyone involved in the sex trade. Unless he could link the project to the corpses of Ostia and Cinecittà, the prosecution was a losing bet.
A few dead bodies remained, but they could well have been results of hoodlums murdering each other, a gang war that had started and ended for no good reason and deals involving any number of incorrigible pieces of shit.
In an office where the air was thick with cigarette smoke, at last the horrible word echoed like the clap of doom: failure. Michelangelo tried to lighten the atmosphere with one of those pat phrases that diehards love to say to themselves:
“Hope springs eternal. We still have a whole week until the the vote. Let’s try to make good use of what little time remains to us.”
Marco played along. He promised, he swore that he’d redouble his efforts. He’d go back to prison to see Max, once again offering to negotiate Farideh’s release. He’d send his men out to follow all the suspects. He’d dip into special funds to pay old informants and recruit new ones, he’d . . .
Michelangelo, without warning, asked him about Alice.
Marco’s eyes frosted over.
Michelangelo started fooling around with a CD by his beloved Petrucciani.
“I have a confession, Colonel. I like that girl. I liked her the minute I met her. And I’ll admit that I thought about trying to start something up with her. I wouldn’t be able to put my conscience to rest if I didn’t tell you. I even thought about . . . getting in touch with her, in other words, giving her a call, inviting her to come listen to my music.”
Michelangelo.
“I know, it’s despicable. But each of us has our weaknesses. I apologize. In any case, I didn’t do it.”
Marco went back to Ponte Salario. De Candia had reopened the wound. A sense of defeat had taken hold of him. Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice. She had dissolved in the slow drizzle of the chilly Rome November.
As he was leafing through the reports for the umpteenth time, searching for the damned link that continued to escape him, Marco decided that November 14 was not merely the deadline for the Great Project, it was also his own deadline.
He could give up the investigation and keep Alice.
He could lose Alice and wipe the entire gang of shits off the face of the earth.
It wasn’t the same thing, and it amounted to human sacrifice. He’d grown resigned to it, in the fullness of time.
But he could only tolerate one loss at a time, not all of them together.
Losing everything, and all at one fell swoop, was just intolerable.
It meant losing Rome.
All right. He’d leave Rome.
Rome doesn’t change. Rome can’t be redeemed. Remo Remotti had been right. So Rome could go fuck itself.
Alba walked in without knocking. It had become a habit. The more remote he became, the harder she worked to break through the blockade, without results.
Alba watched him as he sank ever lower and she couldn’t resign herself to it.
If she could only lay her hands on that damned dark-haired zecca. How could she have managed to suck his soul out of him like that?
But she had no intention of giving up on him.
“I have Spadino’s cell phone,” she said, dumping a boxful of phone records onto his desk.
“That’s not possible,” he retorted, wearily. “We don’t even know what SIM card he was using and the phone itself was destroyed in the fire.
“I tracked back to it by looking at the calls to and from Max’s phone. It’s all in there,” she shot back in a defiant tone, pointing at the documents.
Marco sighed. Spreadsheets weren’t his strong suit. The phone providers gave out information with an eyedropper, each time it was as if someone had asked if they could screw their sisters. The data arrived broken out and scrambled. It was up to them to find their way through the maze of SIM cards, IMEI codes, fictitious account holders, incoming and outgoing calls, cell towers engaged. Alba had a genuine talent for that kind of painstaking work.
“It’ll be faster if you just tell me, Alba.”
The captain sat down.
“Spadino used a SIM card taken out in the name of a nonexistent customer. A Romanian.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Can you imagine a nonexistent Romanian repeatedly calling Spadino’s mother and sister? I can’t.”
“Go on.”
“There are phone calls to Max and other members of the crew, Paja and Fieno, for example. Nothing connected with Number Eight, but that’s not the point. Let’s go to the night of June 12. There are incoming and outgoing calls to the phone number of a prostitute, who plied her trade under the name of Lara. I checked it out. This Lara’s cell phone turns out to be disconnected, out of service. And you know when it went dead? Two days after the death of Spadino on June 20. Anyway, I went ahead and chased down this Lara’s list of contacts. Lots of incoming and outgoing calls on the cell phone number of another prostitute, a certain Vicky Krulaitis. Excellent. This Vicky was found after the August holidays in the Marcigliana nature reserve. Eaten by dogs. From what was left of her, we were able to determine that she’d been dead for a couple of months. Her last phone contacts: the night of June 12. And that’s not all. Lara had a website, which had been taken down. www.larasecrets.com. It was two of them, working as a team, her and a girlfriend . . . ”
“Vicky.”
“Exactly. On June 12, this Vicky stopped communicating. Two months later, she was dead. Her best friend vanished two days after Spadino’s murder. She shut down her site, got rid of her cell phone. She’s involved. And Spadino’s involved, too. For two reasons. First: he and Lara reached out to each other on the twelfth. Second: a few days later, Spadino was dead, too.”
“Right. The two events seem to be connected. Spadino’s death triggers the war. But do gang wars break out over a dead whore? And how did she die anyway?”
“That’s something we’ll find out,” Alba smiled, adding, after a well-timed pause: “And now let’s see if we can’t dream a little. It’s June 14. Vicky has been missing for two days and it’s reasonable to think that she’s already dead. It’s nine in the morning. Spadino calls the switchboard at the chamber of deputies. Now, Colonel, unless your dark-haired zecca has boiled what’s left of your brain away, then I say to you: whores, Spadino, that is, a lackey of the Anacletis, and the chamber of deputies . . . who comes to mind? The first one to guess wins, eh, those are the rules . . . Now, a-one, and a-two, and . . . ”
“Malgradi!” they both shouted, in unison.
Alba fell back against her seat back, eyes glowing with pride.
From that point on, it was a race against the clock. Alba added a detail to her presentation that would eventually prove fundamental. All of the phone calls made on the night of June 12 went through the same cell tower in the historical center of town. Lara, Vicky, and Spadino, then, had to have spent that night within a perimeter that ranged, roughly speaking, from Piazza Venezia to Ponte Sant’Angelo. Marco remembered another detail: Alice had told him that Malgradi had a habit of taking his escorts to the hotel La Chiocciola.
“And how would you happen to know that?” Alba asked.
“Forget about it,” he replied, feeling a stab of pain in his heart as he remembered that asshole with the ponytail. And after all, who even knows if t
he two of them had ever really been in the Anna Magnani suite at the hotel.
They decided that that was as good a place to start as any. They went there around midnight, disguised as a couple up to no good. The night porter, an Albanian with a lean and hungry look about him, along with a strong smell of broccoli, shut the issue of the Corriere dello Sport that he was reading and didn’t even give them a chance to speak.
“Are you police or Carabinieri?”
Marco and Alba exchanged a guilty glance like a couple of kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
“Carabinieri,” said Marco.
“What rank?”
Alba was on the verge of taking offense. Marco placated her with a kick.
“High ranking. You can trust us.”
“I’m listening.”
Alba showed him the pictures that the RIS cyber technicians had extracted in record time from the reconstruction of the altered website. They were the two women who called themselves Lara and Vicky.
The Albanian looked, looked again, and smiled.
“I really love Italy,” he sighed, “but Italy doesn’t love me. My sister and I have been waiting five years to get citizenship.”
Alba erupted in anger. Just who the hell did this Albanian think he was? This wasn’t a bargaining session, this was an official inquiry, part of a police investigation. Did he know something? Then he’d better tell them about it, with no more beating about the bush. Or they would subject him to the most unpleasant of experiences. Did he understand that they could expel him from the country whenever they chose, with a sharp kick in the ass? What the fuck, he was dealing with the Italian state now.
The Albanian took the upbraiding she dealt out without losing his composure, then shook his head.
“I’ve never seen either of these women, I’m sorry.”
Marco shot Alba a furious glare and gestured for her to step aside. He pulled out his police ID and laid it down in front of the night porter.
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