Suburra

by Giancarlo De Cataldo

On December 20, in the presence of Thierry de Roche and a half dozen high-ranking officers in full regalia, in the windswept courtyard of the Pisacane Barracks, General Rapisarda presented Marco Malatesta with the Carabinieri Corps’ solemn certificate of encomium “in recognition of his achievements: the recovery of a vast quantity of narcotics with an elevated level of purity, and exceptional investigative skill shown in the resolution of numerous homicidical crimes.”

  As Rapisarda was shaking his hand, his face glowing with pride like an illustration on the Carabinieri’s official calendar, Marco, grim-faced and impassive, muttered:

  “Homicidal, General, sir, homicidal crimes. The adjective homicidical doesn’t exist in the Italian language.”

  “Ah, yes, of course, of course . . . very good!” Rapisarda responded, even though he hadn’t really even understood. “And I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to add to the official praise my own personal congratulations, in the hopes that certain misunderstandings that have divided us in the past might now be put definitively behind us.”

  Marco said nothing, grabbed the parchment certificate, bowed mockingly and half-heartedly in the direction of the “Carabiniere on Horseback,” and started to turn away. Asshole. Opportunist. A month ago you were ready and willing to kick me headfirst into hell. I ought to have just let you do it. At least, then, maybe, I’d have felt at home.

  Rapisarda, this time speaking confidentially, put a hand on his arm.

  “Terenzi, that miserable individual . . . I’ve taken him under my direct supervision. At the Custoza station. I put him in the stables, where he can clean up horse manure all day. The decision was made to avoid an embarrassing trial. No one at DIGOS raised any objections, and we came to a reasonable understanding with Dottor Setola in the district attorney’s office, too. These days, when law enforcement is in the midst of a delicate operation to improve its public image, we might just as well do our best to avoid excessive ruckus . . . I certainly hope that you’re in agreement . . . ”

  “If that’s everything, General, sir . . . ”

  “Perhaps it might have been advisable for you to have a few words with your friend, Dottoressa Savelli. A less . . . aggressive attitude on her part might have been a good idea.”

  “Considering the state of my relations with Dottoressa Savelli, I’m afraid that anything I might have attempted would only have been counterproductive, at the very least.”

  Rapisarda was clearly hurt. For an instant he stared at him, with flash of the old, completely sincere hatred. But he regained his composure almost instantly, mollusk that he was.

  “I understand, I understand. We’ll solve that problem in some other way. Well, the corps is proud to be able to count an investigator of your caliber in its ranks. Ah, one last thing. About that young Carabiniere, the one from up north, his name slips my mind . . . ”

  “Brandolin.”

  “That’s it, very good, Brandolin. Your request has been accepted, Malatesta. He’ll come to work with you at the ROS. Are you happy about that, Colonel?”

  Marco nodded, just to put an end to the misery, and left to join Thierry, who had witnessed the pantomime with a sardonic little smile that required no commentary.

  Protected by his superior officer, he dodged and evaded smiles both envious and sincere, slaps on the back that were both malicious and affectionate, handshakes both hypocritical and heartfelt. He finally found a little peace in a drag on his Camel cigarette and in the comfort being offered by his friend the general.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way, that’s not worthy of you.”

  “At your orders, General, sir.”

  “Just think,” Thierry resumed, overlooking the other man’s sarcastic tone, “you missed a lovely homily from our friend Spartaco Liberati. You’ve suddenly shot up into his top ten. You should have heard him, this morning. Colonel Malatesta . . . the hero who sweeps the streets clean.”

  “Let me guess: cleaning the streets of gypsies and every other kind of zammammero . . . ”

  “Now you’re going to ruin the fun of the surprise. I recorded the whole thing for you.”

  Marco, with a smirk, shook his hand.

  “Emanuele, I’m sick and tired of all this.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “And I can imagine what you’re going to say to me. But this time you won’t be able to talk me out of it.”

  The general gave him a slap on the back. Marco had his reasons for what he was saying. But they were the reasons of a wounded animal, irrational reasons. No matter what the argument he employed, right then and there, it would do no good. For that matter, the Carabinieri as a corps, and the government itself, could ill afford to lose an officer like him. This state, crumbling to pieces as it is, a state that needs to be glued together in defiance of its innate tendency to fracture, needed to be kept united against its all-powerful cupio dissolui, its “desire to dissolve.”

  “Did you get here on that?” Thierry asked, pointing at the Triumph Bonneville.

  “It’s one of the few things left I can rely on.”

  “I’ve dreamed of taking a spin on it for what seems like forever, Marco.”

  Without another word, Malatesta handed him a helmet.

  “I’ll drive,” the general said brusquely, “and that’s an order.”

  From his office window, General Rapisarda had followed the skit with increasing disgust. Sure as death those two were talking about him. And what they were saying wasn’t hard to guess. After all, that Steve McQueen-style motorcycle. An officer riding a Triumph was already an anomaly, but everyone knows that Malatesta is an anarchist. Let’s even admit that this round had certainly gone Malatesta’s way, but it was just one round and the match was long. Still, two senior officers riding a motorcycle was something close to a lethal insult. The overall degeneration of standards had contaminated the corps by now, the last bulwark of order and decency in a larger context of intolerable degradation.

  His assistant knocked on the door and then extended an elegant envelope.

  The general acknowledged with a shiver of pleasure the invitation from Temistocle Malgradi.

  Trevignano sul Lago and the Villa Marianna Clinic.

  The lake was starting to get on her nerves. The little biting flies were killing her. You want to put Trevignano up against Ostia? But in the end Morgana had gotten used to it. Shalva’s silences were priceless. That man never wasted a syllable. He talked the way he fucked. Spare and essential. And the coke to get fucked up on was available in plentiful abundance in the villa, which by the way, upon her arrival, had suddenly been populated by a pair of extremely helpful and solicitous middle-aged Georgian women who had been sent up from Bari. She was waited upon and held in the highest regard. Breakfast in bed, lunches and dinners served at a table with a tablecloth seven days a week whenever she felt hungry, clean linen every morning. A princess, she had become. And so, to shake up that perfect of idyllic boredom she’d wound up in the middle of, Morgana had decided to give heroin a try. She smoked it. She only ever smoked it. None of that filth from the last century, tying off with surgical tubing and shooting up.

  She’d started out with no more than a gram a day. And the thing seemed to amuse Shalva a great deal too, the sight of her wandering around the house with aluminum foil and glass pipes. Unlike cocaine, heroin gave her a sense of profound, definitive peace, something she’d never before experienced in her life. Getting fucked up had turned into an inner exploration, an armistice with a painful past, a sedative against the call of the street that, nonetheless, assailed her from time to time. Like that afternoon, when it swept over her without warning.

  She had driven down to Bracciano in the black Toyota Aygo to do some shooting in a nearby quarry—Shalva was insistent that she needed to keep her skills honed. “I’ve never seen a woman shoot the way you do,” he kept saying—and at the stopl
ight two kids pulled up next to her on an SH motorbike. Age sixteen or seventeen. The one on back had stared at her and, after lifting his hand to his mouth, had started pushing his cheek out with his tongue.

  Blowjob queen. They were calling her a blowjob queen. Just for the fun of humiliating her.

  She could have just laughed it off. When she was a kid, she often used to do the same thing in Ostia. With Marzia, her best friend, whose life had ended at age sixteen when she’d slammed into a maritime pine on Via Cristoforo Colombo. They would single out men driving alone. Especially men over sixty. And they snickered at the idea of the effect that their prank must have on guys who maybe even couldn’t get it up anymore.

  Sure, she could have just laughed off what those two little assholes had done at the stoplight. But she didn’t.

  She followed the kids outside of the town of Bracciano, and when they hit the first hairpin curves heading up to Via Cassia, she screeched ahead of them, cutting them off. She made them take off their trousers and underpants and kneel in the weeds. Then she forced each of them to suck on the cold barrel of the .38 as she clutched it in her fist, until they were docile and good as little lambs.

  She went back to the villa, pursued by ghosts. Cesare, Denis, Robertino, the Moroccan from Cinecittà. They were calling to her. They were laughing, but then their heads exploded. Like balloons.

  She rummaged around in the big mahogany credenza in the living room where the heroin was bagged in a one-ounce cellophane wrapper, and decided that she wouldn’t bother with the little scale this time. No need to weigh it. She lifted the pipe to her mouth and started filling her lungs.

  “Keep your eyes open! Keep your fucking eyes open!”

  Sprawled on the front seat in the Audi, she could hear Shalva shouting. With his left hand, the Georgian was miraculously keeping the car on the road despite the insane speeds at which he was driving, while with his right hand he shook her, making her chin wobble over her cashmere sweater, which had been reduced to a sponge soaked in vomit, bile, and mucus. They were expecting them at Villa Marianna.

  Temistocle Malgradi gestured dramatically to two ogres wearing scrubs, the scrubs being the only thing that identified them as nurses. And he devoted to that overdose the attention you’d expect from a veterinarian asked to look after a dog with indigestion. He was in a hell of a hurry.

  “You’re going to have to forgive me, eh. But I have other things to do. Today’s the big day. The big day.”

  With the eyes of a wolf, Shalva followed Professor Malgradi as he climbed into his Audi Q7.

  If she died, Malgradi was a dead man.

  Morgana was tossed onto a gurney that they trundled straight into intensive care.

  Shalva was holding her hand.

  “You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.”

  Summoning up all the strength that remained to her, she looked at him, her eyes open wide.

  “Don’t save me,” she said.

  The doors into intensive care swallowed up the gurney with Morgana on it, and Shalva was left alone in the corridor. Paralyzed by the words he was listening to.

  “I love you. I love you.”

  Words that he was speaking.

  Hall of Justice and Bar Necci.

  The day after receiving his certificate of solemn praise, Marco, accompanied by Alba Bruni, attended the first hearing of the summary court procedure for the incidents at St. John Lateran. When the prosecuting magistrate Setola called for acquittal in this preliminary session, in accordance with Article 129 of the Penal Code, for Alice Savelli, “a victim of mistaken identity,” a spontaneous burst of applause erupted in the courtroom of the third judicial division, which was packed with demonstrators of varying degrees of innocence. The chief justice threatened to clear the courtroom. Quiet resumed. The defense attorney seconded the prosecuting magistrate’s request. Alice got to her feet and asked if she could make a statement.

  “In my case, Mr. Chief Justice, to call it a case of mistaken identity is a euphemism at best. As Dottor Setola knows perfectly well, I’ve lodged a criminal complaint against Marshal Terenzi for defamation and battery.”

  A new burst of applause and reckless cheers. The chief justice lost his patience and threatened once again to clear the courtroom. Once again, silence fell. Setola took the floor. He explained that Alice’s complaint against Terenzi was a part of the record and that further investigation was currently underway. Alice started once again to launch an objection. Her lawyer grimly yanked her back into her chair, apologized to the court, and indicated that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed. The chief justice exchanged a glance with his fellow judges, then he read the document that had clearly been prepared in advance.

  “In the name of the Italian people, and in view of Article 129 of the Code of Penal Procedures, Savelli, Alice is fully absolved and acquitted of the charges.”

  When the third round of applause erupted, not even the judge could muster an objection, and Alice walked out of the trial and the courtroom on a wave of frantic joyful cheering. Next to her were Diego Ponytail, Farideh—who had been released a few days earlier as a result of Max’s deposition—and old man Abbas, who had finally left the wheelchair behind and was now hobbling along on crutches.

  Marco waited for the ruckus to subside and then, outside in the hallway, he stopped right in front of her. Instinctively, Ponytail put his arm around her with a tenderness that made the lieutenant colonel’s heart bleed.

  “I’m just here to say hello,” Marco justified himself, “and to tell you that I’ll come to the trial to testify against Terenzi.”

  “Do you think there’s going to be a trial, Colonel?” Ponytail challenged him.

  “Diego, please . . . ” whispered Alice.

  Ponytail nodded, and backed off.

  Marco and Alice stood there gazing at each other for a moment. They didn’t know where to begin. They didn’t know if there was anything left to say to each, or if it had all already been said.

  It was she who broke the silence.

  “I was hard on you, I’m sorry for that.”

  “Are you happy?” he asked her.

  Her face lit up in a friendly smile.

  “That’s not really the point, Marco. It never could have worked between us. I . . . I’m one thing, and you’re another.”

  Marco handed her the unsightly little package he had brought from home.

  “This is for you, Alice.”

  “What this is? Some kind of liquidation bonus?” she joked, without sharp edges. But when the unwrapped it and recognized the Burmese Buddha head that she’d liked so much the first time that she’d visited his apartment, a sweet and sincere smile finally lit up her face.

  Marco turned around and put an end to his self-pity. Her cry of “Ti voglio bene!” reached him when he was already several yards away.

  Ti voglio bene. Italian for “I love you,” though not exactly “I love you.”

  Marco was reminded of that verse from a poem by the ancient Latin poet Catullus: plus amo minus bene velle . . . the more I love you the less I wish you well. The heartbreaking wisdom of the young and disappointed lover. His high school teachers would declaim it according to poetic meter . . . plusamò | minús | benevélle . . . plusamò | minús | benevélle . . . euphonious, cute, amusing, no? What better epitaph for a love affair throttled in the cradle by ideology? Or by the stubbornness of the hunter of human scalps? Or by the uniform? Or by the state? Or by all those things together? And, most important of all, had any of it been worth it?

  He kept the question to himself, since after all, there was no answer.

  But that mocking refrain, plusamòminúsbenevélle, continued to obsess him, until Alba, the sweet, sharp-edged Alba, who was staring at him with those big eyes of hers that blended strength and submissiveness, pointed out a small knot
of gentlemen in grey tweed who were festively heading for the exit.

  “Viglione, the Camorrista. The appeals court just acquitted him.”

  “He’ll sue for wrongful arrest, no doubt,” Marco commented drily.

  Sitting at a table in the Bar Necci, Farideh was writing to Max.

  “My love, they say horrible things about you, but I don’t believe them. I believe in you. And I’m going to get you out of that prison. I want you beside me, for good. Because I can’t live without you . . . ”

  Millennium Pride.

  The New Beginning was 400 feet above ground level. In a bright December sunset. In the magnificent and luxuriant towering winter garden on the twenty-eighth floor of the tallest granite skyscraper in the country. The Millennium Pride. A vertiginous deluxe erection in the midst of the green space of EUR. A breathtaking view of the sea off Ostia, the circuit of the Castelli Romani, the ancient city of the amphitheaters and the Suburra. Six hundred “housing units” destined to the Best of the Best.

  Them.

  It had been his idea to christen the new electoral platform in that location—New Beginning, what an evocative name, chirped a couple of matrons smelling of mothballs as they hurried into the event—a platform that would be welcomed into the Third Republic of Italy by the main entrance as it “helped Rome to get back on its feet.”

  Temistocle Malgradi.

  The Candidate.

  The leader of a new reform movement, “part of the moderate center, but still progressive. Catholic, but secular. Free-market conservative, but libertarian.”

  The Professor.

  The new champion of a Civil Society.

  The guardian of the new Open Home, as the party might be called. Ideological orphans and tactical political maneuverers straight out of The Leopard. Intellectuals and politicos putting on the feedbag.

  “My Home will be your Home!” That was the slogan that Temistocle had arranged to print on the invitation in heavy, recycled stock, and it had been sent out to three hundred of the best names—and surnames—in Rome. Managers, powermongers in state-owned industry, major bureaucrats, film producers, actors, university professors, lawyers, notaries, chief physicians, senior officers such as Rapisarda, big names from television journalism and print media, high prelates. A vast swamp of overcoats, garish synthetic fur coats, and down jackets that now, like a black swarm of ants, were being devoured in shifts by the construction hoist that was shuttling up and down between the base and the summit of the tower still under construction.