by Pino Corrias
Andrea: “Let’s sit down and you can tell us how things are going in Rome.”
Oscar focuses on the situation again. He checks the time on his 170-large Patek Philippe. “In an hour, with your permission, I’ll take back my car. So now I have time to tell you a few things that the newspapers aren’t saying yet.”
“For instance?” asked Andrea.
“That there’s a strange cop on your trail. A guy who’s going around asking questions.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because yesterday he came over to my house to talk to me.”
“Fuck, and when were you planning to tell us?”
“I’m telling you now. Do you want to hear the rest or not?”
“Do you need a written request?” Andrea said.
“No, as long as you pour me a drink and pass me some caviar.”
In the meantime, he pulls out a pebble of coke and a credit card. They sit down around the little white hearth, and they take turns serving themselves. And when Oscar tells the story it’s already a movie you can watch, even if he doesn’t actually illuminate all the details. He leaves things out when he feels like it. He adjusts where it suits him. But in the meantime they eat, drink, and snort. And they fly into the movie.
Enter the Cop
The cop is called Raul Ventura. He comes from the fogs of Milan. He’s forty years old or so. His face is haggard and hollow under the cheekbones, his hair is crew cut, his eyes are black velvet, his respiration is calm and slow. He’s wearing a hazelnut suit, a light-blue shirt, and a loosened tie. He has shoulders like a refrigerator and the hands of a pianist.
His father was a Communist factory worker for Fiat. His mother stitched hems and skimped even on breathing. They were both depressed and depressing, though with the best of motives. Raul enlisted at age eighteen to get away from home. And at age twenty-three he was already a cop first class in the ranks of the judicial police for the Tribunal of Milan, flushing out wrongdoers for the bloodhounds of the Bribesville investigation. He’d watched the whole world of before come crashing down. Wives wearing leopard-skin stoles bringing a cutlet for dinner to their husbands, former municipal commissioners, who had been stewing for several days already in the Sixth Wing of San Vittore prison. And young whores hightailing it out of the studio apartment with black wall-to-wall carpeting rented for them by their respective lovers on Via Vincenzo Monti or in the Ticinese neighborhood on the Navigli canal, doing their damnedest to swipe for the last time the credit cards issued in the name of the regional government or the municipal government or the party, cards that they’d been using for years to buy prosciutto crudo at Peck and silky lingerie on Via Montenapoleone, in the name of the Italian people.
When the corps of Bribesville judges was dismantled by the newly arrived bad guys who had come to take the place of the old bad guys and set up the same political con games in their own names, Ventura dismissed the disenchantment at the injustice of the justice system, which was the kind of thing his father liked to wallow in, and understood in plenty of time that “one season had come to an end, God rest its soul.” He managed to get transferred to police headquarters on Via Fatebenefratelli, where he dedicated himself to old-school bandits, thieves, armed robbers, and fences, finding them not entirely despicable, capable at least of distinguishing between good and evil, possessing an ethics of friendship, and a little more respect for the institutions, at least those in uniform, tending to surrender, hands in the air, when confronted by them.
In those years of solitary investigations, Ventura had fallen in love with a Polish girl, Grażyna, who worked at the organic gelato shop across from the San Lorenzo Columns, and who had the melancholy smile, blond hair, and heart of gold of the farm girls of yesteryear. He would go pick her up at closing time and they’d take long nocturnal strolls through the city, in the course of which she’d tell him about the many little things that had happened during the day, and sometimes about her boyfriend in Kraków who stalked her from long distance with his jealousy. And he’d talk, too, as he’d never talked before in his life, though he didn’t even know where all those words came from.
Until he discovered that they came straight from his heart. As did the first kiss, when she said I can’t, I have a boyfriend, but it turned out she very much could, even though she trembled and held him tight, just like on the September night when they made love, in a tent, after climbing a wooded slope in inland Liguria, lighting a fire, eating chestnuts, and looking far out to the distant sea. A night that he remembered as the high point of his happiness, at the culmination of which he asked her to come live with him and she smiled, but said nothing. And she perfected the silence of that night with a subsequent and longer-lasting silence that she vanished into without another word to him, save for three months later, when she sent him a letter to say that she had married her boyfriend, farewell: she hadn’t had the courage to tell him in person, and she was telling him now in writing, reminding him to remember her as a friend and adding the loveliest thing, the hardest thing to take, I loved you that night, you’re a wonderful person, Raul, don’t try to find me.
He had slipped into a state of depression, just like his father, but maybe he’d have been able to forget about her if his Grażyna hadn’t resurfaced a month and a half later in an Interpol circular, having been beaten to death by her husband, Dobro Tanic, age thirty-three, Serbian by birth, former paratrooper, on the run and reported to have been spotted in Northern Italy, armed and dangerous, “approach with extreme care,” possibly heading for the paramilitary camps of Bosnia, or perhaps staying with a cousin in Milan, “urgent assistance” requested. And that urgency became an obsession for him. From Armed Robbery he transferred over to the marshal’s service, the Squadra Catturandi, which worked on tiny specks of evidence, vast gaps, and the long term. In front of his desk he pinned up photographs of Grażyna and the swine who had killed her. He learned the relentlessness of waiting and the elasticity of patience. In five years’ work, he captured a substantial number of fugitives, a couple of ’Ndrangheta killers, a serial rapist, two former extreme right-wing terrorists, and even a former Chilean officer who had been living for years in a Benedictine monastery.
But no trail for Dobro Tanic had ever lasted more than a few months. Three times the blinking red light of circular reports had flickered on: one in Milan, one in Gorizia, and one in Sarajevo. Then, nothing. Maybe he really had burned to a crisp in the Balkan inferno, as he deserved. But for Raul, the sad bloodhound, as his colleagues called him, the time had finally come to cash in the appointment to commissario, get over the things that can’t be gotten over, and take the photo of Grażyna, yellowed now from five years of nicotine, down from the wall. A young actress named Giulia, Roman in both light and personality, had worked the miracle of changing his mood.
For that reason, for a couple of years now, Raul Ventura has been shuttling back and forth to Rome. It helps him metabolize the adrenaline of the investigations, and now he knows whom to call when he’s fed up with chasing bad guys. In the meantime, he’s formed part of an interforce group that specializes in pursuing the glittering tail of the financial system of organized crime. Now he’s hunting down not only fugitives on the run, but also the vast patrimonies that sink into the glittering waters of tax havens, thoroughly laundered narcocapital, tax-exempt profiteering and speculation concealed behind aid to the Third World, import-export companies, anonymous financial shell companies, economic cooperation and development institutes, NGOs, art dealers with the traffic in counterfeits and cash, and infrastructure works contracts in developing nations. And of course, international film and television production.
Experience has taught him to let others take him for a fool if it’s useful. To seem inoffensive when it’s necessary. To pretend to swallow the horseshit that his wealthy marks usually try to palm off on him, thinking they’re sooo crafty, certainly craftier than the texts of the legal codes, which they just used to make paper airplanes.
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br /> When he enters Oscar Martello’s ultramansion he looks around carefully, though without allowing himself to be overly impressed by the living rooms the size of polo fields, with Filipino houseboys instead of horses and frescoed ceilings instead of the sky. There was a time when he would have been left with his jaw hanging and his hands in his pockets, afraid of getting something dirty. With experience he’s learned that these landscapes of billionaire interiors don’t count for anything. He’s seen comparable living rooms in the eighteenth-century villas of Venetian bankrupteers, in the palazzi of Lombard industrialists who are equally expert at philanthropy and bribes, and in the sunny country residences of the Sicilian Mafioso nobility, with bleeding crucifixions under their vaulted ceilings, still lifes of the high Flemish school, and quarterings of saints on the walls. Here there’s none of that vintage cruelty. Here you find its contemporary opposite, the carefree glee of neon and manga, the latest in million-dollar conceptual art. But the point is the same: a theatrical layout of wealth and power, designed to intimidate anyone who looks at it—even if occasionally that excessive willingness to show off is a signal of the owner’s insecurity, usually because that money was piled up too recently.
He introduces himself: “Commissario Raul Ventura, thanks for having agreed to see me in such a hurry.” He starts out all bland and ceremonious, pointing to the newspapers stacked on a glass table. “Do you have any idea of what’s going on?”
Oscar shows him to a seat in front of an immense red-and-bronze marble fireplace. He looks at him, he evaluates him, imagining him as a hunter of runaway adolescent daughters, an investigator of matrimonial problems—in other words, as a complete jackoff. Even though, as he looks a little closer, something doesn’t add up. And so he decides to wait, and in the meantime he reaches into the box for a cigar, feels it, slips it between his fingers, but doesn’t light it up.
“Would you care for one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No.”
“Okay. As far as I know, what’s happened is that my lead actress has run away with my screenwriter, and they took my car to do it.”
Raul Ventura absorbs that ostentation of triple ownership as a small sign of insecurity and mentally files it away. Then he carefully chooses a tone of voice that is at once curious and inoffensive: “And do you think that this is normal or something that doesn’t add up?”
“Love stories usually put me in a good mood.”
“Your own, I can imagine. Other people’s, too?”
Oscar indulges in a smile. “I don’t have any. My wife is very jealous. And I have a simple heart.”
Ventura indulges in a smile of his own. “That I don’t believe.”
“Which of the three things that I told you don’t you believe?”
“The first and the last.”
Once they’re done with the opening skirmishes, Oscar goes and sits down across from him on the big leather sofa, throwing both arms wide on the backrest and enjoying Ventura’s immobile face, as if it were a map of something.
Ventura lets him do it. He continues, “And how do you explain the fact that instead of talking about your actress in the entertainment pages, the newspapers are featuring her today in the crime pages? Where does this whole story of Mafia and kidnappings come out of?”
“Ask the newspapers.”
“No, I’m asking you, since you spoon-fed them the story.”
“According to who?”
Ventura smooths his tie with an instinctive gesture and turns up his tone of voice by a couple of notches. “I’ll ask the questions and you’ll answer them: that’s the way it works. We know things even when we pretend that we don’t.”
Oscar looks at him and says nothing.
Ventura continues, “Words like ‘Mafia’ and ‘kidnappings,’ Signor Martello, have the ability to alarm my bosses very much. They upset them to such a degree that when they go to sleep, they check to make sure I stay up.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Really?”
Oscar thinks it over, stands up, snips off the end of the Cohiba, lights it, sits back down, and says, “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Just what I asked you before: Do you have any idea of what’s going on?”
Oscar blows out the smoke. “I think I do.”
“Then where does all this talk about the Mafia come from?”
“It’s just an idea that is suggested by the plot of the movie.”
“Is that what’s suggesting it, or is someone suggesting it?”
“The papers go crazy about stories like this, and we do our best to give them what they want. And by we, I mean the boys at the press agency War & Peace, who are in charge of launching the movie.”
“That’s better.”
“We’re trying to pump up the case, do I make myself clear?”
Ventura doesn’t change expression. “The fact remains that Signorina Jacaranda Rizzi has had her phones turned off for the past three days, no one knows where she is, and her agent is calling the police—that is, me—six times a day.”
“I understand you.”
“I doubt you do. So where is she?”
“I imagine happily ensconced with her new boyfriend.”
“We’re talking about Andrea Serrano, right? His phone’s turned off, too. And both of them are driving around somewhere in your car.”
“I have three others.”
“Lucky you. But why turn off the cell phone?”
“Do you want my opinion? She was having an affair with the director before. Their relationship lasted more or less the duration of shooting and postproduction. Then it ended with a clean cut. Maybe now he’s stalking her and she decided to cut him off.”
Ventura wants to give him plenty of rope, so he’ll talk and give him some impression. “They live pretty fast lives, these actresses, just the way an outsider imagines them.”
“Commissario, no disrespect intended, but dogs pee to mark their territory, right? Well, actresses fuck to mark their territory. Is that clear? And not content with that, they marry the men who will issue their future contracts. You may have noticed that at least half of the women who are successful become the wives of directors or producers.” He laughs, ha ha! “Do you think it’s true love or an insurance policy?” He points his finger at him. “I know what you’d like to ask me, Commissario. Well, let me answer before you ask: no, my wife is not an actress.”
Now it’s Ventura’s turn to laugh, and he does it out of courtesy.
In the meantime, Oscar has gotten to his feet. “I want to show you my lily pad tank. It’s the place in my home I like best, come along.” They reach the other living room, along the short side of which runs a green marble basin about forty feet long and half that width, full of gurgling water, in which LEDs bob along with lily pads that are reflected in the terrace windows from which you can glimpse the rooftops of Rome. All told, a notable display of what it means to live in the Superworld, fill it with water, and savor it. “My friend Hans Op de Beeck designed it for me. Do you like it?” He points to the rest of the living room floor. “I had to have the whole structure reinforced with cement and steel I beams to support the weight of the water. But it was worth it.” Not even alluding to the insane cost of the basin, Oscar winds up underlining it as an immense missing detail.
Ventura, just to irritate him, turns around, then goes over and sits in a Ron Arad armchair, the kind made of wrought iron, perfect for backaches, with his back to the basin. “Very cinematic. But you were telling me about actresses in general.”
Oscar registers the lack of interest, but pretends to have missed it. “I was talking about the movies. And the fact that people still believe that it is”—with his fingers he sketches out scare quotes in the air—“the ‘place of transgression.’ Wrong. There’s no place more conformist than the movie industry: anyone who can, steals; anyone who manages to pull it off, takes sex when they can
get it; those who have political connections climb the career ladder. Everyone else struggles to get by and tries to hang on with the public funds from the ministry. Just like at the post office.”
“Did you know about this plan to escape in advance?”
Oscar bursts out laughing. “In your opinion, Commissario, does a producer not know what his characters are going to do?” He actually uses the words “his characters.”
“Okay, then tell me about them. Starting with Jacaranda Rizzi.”
“What do you want to know about her?”
“What she’s like, inside and out.”
“She’s beautiful. Apparently fragile. In reality, relentless and determined. Meticulous about her work. A first-rate professional.”
“Okay. And skipping over all the decorative ornamentation?”
Oscar takes a deep drag, chooses an armchair for himself out of his vast collection, a Gio Ponti Continuum. He sits down. He exhales. “Skipping over the decorative ornamentation? A difficult, unfortunate woman, like all actresses. And I say that fondly, don’t get me wrong. A woman capable of being anyone on set, but who never knows who she is in real life. And so when the lights go out on set, she deflates and flutters to the ground like a dropped silk scarf. A drug addict, strung out on pills, tranquilizers, and other crap like that.”
“A cruel portrait.”
“Balanced by the eyes of a doe.”
“Could she hurt herself?”
Oscar removes a nonexistent speck of dust from his white shirt. “Commit suicide?” He stops, he savors the pause. Then he bursts out laughing, ha ha! “Of course she could. But not with the movie about to premiere, Commissario. No actress, no matter how hysterical, depressed, or whacked out on pills would ever do such a thing.”
“Okay. What about the guy she went off with?”