The Ballad of Mila

by Matteo Strukul

  Around him a crowd of minions enjoying the show. The heating was cranked up and the temperature was semi-tropical, so much so that Hell would have felt like a Canadian ice hockey rink in comparison.

  The massive bowling alley was revolving in Longhin’s protruding eyes. Thirty-two lanes: white, red and blue; at the entrance, a bar as big as an aircraft carrier, small tables everywhere, looking just like a typical American diner. The sweet smell of the caramel popcorn made the area around him an oasis of even warmer air, whipped by gusts of an appalling stench. Around the popcorn, glasses of some kind of spritz, the regular local aperitif, with Aperol. Orange, like traffic lights in a glass.

  “I need to tell the assholes in maintenance to open some windows here,” said Pagnan wiping his lips with the white sleeve of his shirt. “So, you piece of shit, are you going to talk?” he added looking at Longhin.

  Who could only shake his head.

  “Otto, you're a real dickhead. Don’t you get it? If you remain silent, we'll tear you to pieces. If you talk, you might stand a chance.”

  “Ugh,” said Longhin. A grunt of pain rather than an answer.

  “Look, if you're afraid the assholes you betrayed me to are going to do something to you, well...” carried on Pagnan raising a grey eyebrow like a fat old wolf, “I'll make mincemeat out of you. Do you understand, you piece of shit, you traitor, you Judas?”

  Pagnan kept talking like a politician giving a speech, as he always did when he had the whip hand.

  And on this occasion he definitely did.

  First of all, the building lay in the middle of the Veneto farmland like a monolith on the face of the moon. Second: it belonged to him. Third: it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

  So there was nowhere safer to torture a back-stabbing traitor in the whole of Veneto. As luck would have it, Longhin had had the brilliant idea of getting caught on a Monday.

  Pagnan was beaming. He had decided he’d work the bastard slowly. Like in the old days, when he’d have camped out here until he'd ripped the bastard's eternal soul from his body. So to speak.

  Mule was enjoying the show, staring at Longhin at the end on the lane. He took a spritz from the table, swallowed a couple of mouthfuls then said, “Because of this asshole, poor old Schiavo lost his life. Now I want to have some fun.” With a glittering smirk he took a shiny, deep blue bowling ball. He raised it to his chest and caressed it with his other hand. “Here it comes, Otto!” he shouted.

  With a short run up and a nice power stroke, Mule rolled the ball along the lane. It was a precise shot, straight and quite hard.

  Longhin’s eyes opened wide. The ball was rolling towards him, getting faster and faster.

  It hit him in the crotch. He shouted and pulled against the noose around his throat.

  “Strike!” shouted Mule. He gulped down the rest of his spritz, wiped his lips with a paper towel and started doing the twist at his end of the lane.

  Pagnan exploded in wild laughter, and so did his gang. Then he stood up and chose a ball for himself.

  He jumped to the foul line, moving his thick legs as fast as he could, his belly swinging; his bright pink Crocs helped make him look like a hippo doing a psychedelic dance number. The ball left his hand in a swing that ate up the ground at speed, only stopping when it came into contact with Longhin’s right kneecap.

  Crack!

  “Mmpf.” A whimper of pain.

  “Come on, Otto. Talk and all this shit will be over,” Pagnan encouraged him, and started walking down the bowling lane towards his prisoner.

  When he was halfway there, his mobile rang. He checked the display and took a long breath. His eyes filled with dread. Resigned, he clicked the keypad and took the call.

  “Hey, you old scoundrel, how’s things?” Benny Marcato’s voice was low and smooth. The Mayor of Muson always talked as if he was speaking on the radio.

  Pagnan grinned and cleared his throat, gathering all his diplomacy skills.

  “Hey, my dear sir, how are you?”

  “Besides the fact that it's only two days to the great event, everything's fine. I can’t complain.” A pause. “Of course, it's going to be a great event, right?”

  Pagnan rolled his eyes. That stuff was wearing him out. Riding stables and horses, horses and riding stables. He was busy demolishing a man with a bowling ball and this asshole was spoiling what ought to be a sacred pleasure. Sometimes life is merciless. “Yes, it'll be the crowning moment of the magnificent work we've done together,” he managed to say.

  “I was thinking the same, you know. Even that old idiot of a parish priest is beaming his face off. Have you decided on the key points of your speech yet?”

  “Well, I have a lot on my mind...”

  What the hell was he talking about? He remembered fuck all. His memory was a black hole and improvising on the topic of horses was going to be about as easy as roping a ferret.

  “Wonderful. And remember the children, say something about the children.”

  “Of course.”

  “We need to make the audience feel comfortable. Or rather, make all the cash cows happy to be joining a super-exclusive club.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “We need to reassure them that their children will be treated like little princes and princesses. Not only will the little dears learn how to ride a horse, but they'll be constantly monitored for their protection. There'll be no chance of them getting hurt. Anyway, a horse is a child’s best friend.”

  Benny Marcato was completely out of his mind. What was he thinking? Was he expecting him, Rossano Pagnan, to behave like a circus seal? Yes, of course, a gloss of respectability was important, but not so much to allow that fuckwit to brainwash him. He decided to end the call.

  “That’s great, Benny, thanks for ringing. Now I really have to go.”

  “Of course, Rossano. Sorry for calling you so late, I just wanted to check everything was going according to plan.”

  “Don’t worry. The opening speech is in safe hands.”

  “That’s great. I count on it, my good man!”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “OK, have a nice evening.”

  “Same to you.”

  Pagnan's head filled with malevolent thoughts but he sent them scurrying away as if they were sewer rats. He breathed through his nose.

  “So,” he said, trying to preserve some dignity, “where were we? Ah, yes, I was coming to you, matey.” He recommenced his walk towards the end of the bowling lane.

  The other members of the gang were looking at him, expectantly. The Mayor’s call had not been long enough to make everyone lose the quiet lust for blood that had inhabited them since the start of the evening. Each had used the enforced break their own way. Mule had made himself his umpteenth spritz: icy cold sparkling wine straight from the cooler, Aperol, very fizzy water and lots of ice. He could have drunk twenty of them on the go. Spritz was a real drug for him, and even though people said that only poofs used Aperol and he should use Campari, well, he didn’t give a shit. Because he was Mule, nobody could piss him off, and also – after the Big White Chief – he was the one they all had to deal with, like it or not.

  Not far away from Mule, Tripe, at a small table, was having a taste of his favourite meal, the rich, sour smell of it filling his nostrils. In front of his eyes was a huge bowl of Veneto-style tripe. While chewing his fingernails waiting for the others to come back from their hospital raid with the traitor-mummy, he'd grown hungry. He had a mountain of nosh prepared by Pretty Boy, the bowling alley cook, a confirmed womanizer and former butcher, who knew every cut of meat inside out, and was a custodian of traditional cuisine.

  Pretty Boy had left the kitchen and started sharpening a battery of knives he had carefully set up on a wooden table next to the bowling lanes.

  He was wearing a blue apron like some cowherd from South Tirol. It was stained with blood and worn over a white undershirt, combat trousers and hiking boots. His huge chest expanded under a head
covered in a mane of thick, jet-black hair. Ice cold eyes and a pretty big nose contributed to his determined, resolute appearance.

  Pagnan was standing in front of Longhin. He looked in his eyes then slapped him twice, the sound like a whiplash.

  “Dirty scab. Decided not to speak, eh?”

  “Aargh,” was the answer.

  Pagnan started tightening the wire mask that locked Longhin’s jaws together.

  Tighter and tighter.

  “Does that hurt, asshole?”

  Tighter and tighter.

  “Uugh.”

  Tighter.

  Blood started to flow copiously from Longhin’s cracked lips. In a pointless attempt to free himself from the grip, he was flailing about like a rabid dog on a chain.

  “Boss, he'll never be able to talk like that,” Polenta pointed out.

  “I don’t believe I asked your opinion, shit for brains,” he replied. “Actually, while you're in the mood for shit, go tell Pretty Boy to come over with a couple of carving knives. Let’s see how ballsy our cowboy is.”

  “Coming, Boss,” said Pretty Boy immediately, as if he'd been called to go collect a million Euro lottery win.

  “No, wait,” Pagnan said. “I want that pain in the ass, Polenta, to ask you.”

  Mule chuckled.

  Tripe froze, a forkful of food halfway between the plate and his mouth.

  Polenta swore under his breath. Then, in a single breath, he said “Pretty Boy, the Boss wants you to join him with a couple of carving knives to have fun with that asshole, Longhin.”

  “If you don’t mind!” shouted Pagnan.

  “What?” asked Polenta.

  “You need to add ‘If you don’t mind’,” added Pagnan. By then he had decided to go on with it, humiliating Polenta and indulging in a little display of power.

  The Boss liked to brag a bit.

  Polenta clenched his teeth. “If you don’t mind,” he barked.

  “OK,” confirmed Pretty Boy, then he started to walk towards the other end of the lane holding two shining knives, iron stings ready to bite into Longhin’s flesh.

  “Aaah!” Longhin screamed.

  Guo didn’t understand.

  There was no news from Zhang.

  And that had consequences. For instance, there was no way he could focus on his speech.

  He had decided to practice it from top to bottom, working on each word, trying make his Italian perfect.

  He wanted to overshadow all the other speakers and impress the president of the provincial SME confederation, but he was genuinely worried about his nephew. Each time he got to the point where he itemised the ingredients of a spring roll, he stopped and thought about Zhang.

  He had decided to use cuisine as an anthropological symbol, as a smart way to compare the two cultures. That was the reason he professed a “fusion” cuisine. He was sure that the SME president would have loved to hear him being so proactive, so open towards local traditions. Comparing tofu and bean soup was a risky thing for sure, but it was also original, a sign of a very open mind.

  Even though he was making every effort, he just couldn't focus: as soon as he paused in his speech to highlight some key passage, Zhang’s face appeared in his mind’s eye and drew him to a halt.

  Also, the signals he had received in the last few hours were not encouraging: no news at all, even though he had insisted on being told as soon as the game with the redhead was over. And worse still, Xan and Wu seemed to have disappeared as well.

  It all stunk like rotten seaweed. Guo was afraid that a hole had opened in the perfect structure of the Talking Daggers.

  He had a bad feeling that someone was challenging the control he had on that land of failures, a control that was total and complete by now, after years of hard work. And maybe that someone was a dreadlocked redhead. It was only a feeling, of course, but it became more and more unpleasant hour after hour. And the blackout on what had happened to his men did nothing to help him see the matter in a better light.

  Guo had made a mistake, only one, but it was unforgivable. This at least was clear. He had trusted an Italian. A useless, stupid laowai.

  He had decided to give him a chance only because his nephew had insisted. Zhang had told him that he needed to change his way of thinking, to put more trust in the younger generation and that he, Zhang, wanted a chance to be noticed by the whole clan and thus gain their respect.

  Guo felt that there was something rotten somewhere. He had caused that crack in the structure of the Talking Daggers clan himself by using inferior material: Ottorino Longhin.

  Even though he'd done nothing wrong until then.

  He had worked hard, year upon year, to set up a traffic of immigrant slaves, sucking the blood of the wu ming, the nameless, the clandestines that travelled from Asia to the garden of delights that is north-east Italy. Thus he had slowly built a small empire.

  It had all started when he decided to found the Red Lotus association, officially supporting Chinese immigrants in getting to grips with local bureaucracy – from finding a job and a place to stay, to sorting out all the paperwork – but that was actually a cover for a supermarket of exploitation. By blackmailing the families who were still in China, Guo earned himself thousands and thousands of Euros. He asked for twenty thousand for each individual, and those who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, quickly became torture fodder.

  His men were creative and spared no expense. They beat up each and every new arrival at least until his or her family was prepared to send the money. Then the new immigrant was ready to work for Guo in one of his restaurants in the Veneto countryside or in a bar in the outskirts of Padua or Vicenza. An alternative to being beaten up was to earn their ransom in a sweatshop, locked away in a warehouse with darkened windows, working eighteen-hour shifts.

  All of that while sucking the blood of north-east Italy: jeans for fashionable people, five Euro rather than twenty-five; shirts for twenty rather than forty. Of course without any of this appearing officially: a dense web of third parties had signed contracts with the major brands that included a veto on subcontracting, a prohibition circumvented by using an army of invisible slaves.

  A silent, deadly machine. In Veneto, dozens of entrepreneurs in the textile business had taken their own lives.

  Gou had filled the Brenta and Treviso area with his warehouses. He paid his slaves a minimum percentage for each article of clothing they produced, without an hourly wage. Thus he gained an advantage on two fronts: first of all he extended the time they needed to pay their ransom, allowing him to continue employing a pretty much unpaid workforce; also, he forced the wu ming to work themselves silly with the fantasy of earning their freedom.

  So, little by little, he had deprived Veneto not only of its factories, closing one after another, nearly two hundred every year, but also of its tradition of craftsmanship: the old tailoring schools were starting to disappear, even those that represented the region’s oldest heritage.

  There it was, globalisation in Chinese sauce.

  And those imbecile Italian dickheads hadn’t even realised.

  And then there were drugs. With the authority coming from his role of White Paper Fan of Triad 14K, Guo was able to re-invest truckloads of money – accumulated by dealing in Double Uoglobe heroin – in the Italian north-east. The purest heroin in the world. Chinese couriers brought it to Paris where it was cut and sent to Amsterdam, to one of the richest and most densely populated Chinatowns in Europe. Little by little, 14K had added the business of cocaine and synthetic drugs to that of heroin. With the unbelievable amount of money thus earned Guo had been able to buy restaurants, bars, shops, warehouses and industrial machinery.

  Extorting protection money from the Chinese restaurants that didn’t belong to him yet was another method of earning more cash and reducing his competition. Those owners who refused were killed, their bodies burned and hidden somewhere. And they were replaced by a 14K member.

  The perfect organisation Guo had set up h
ad until then made sure that his hidden assault on the economy of the Italian north-east hadn’t involved any clashes with the judiciary or with local criminal organisations.

  That tug-of-war with Pagnan’s clan, however, was likely to provoke the situation. Guo was aware that because of his organisation’s constant growth, he would sooner or later be forced into some kind of an arrangement with Pagnan's people, but he would have preferred to create an alliance rather than have a direct confrontation.

  But he had been completely wrong when he picked a man like Longhin. And now, to make things more complicated, there was that girl.

  To employ an Italian had been a breach of the guanxi, the relation, that bond of mutual support that linked all the members of the “family” to one another. Not only sons, nephew, cousins and brothers, but everyone who belonged to a much wider group of people from Wenzhou, the area Guo himself came from. Guanxi was founded on li, the proper ritual behaviour that governs human relationships as a whole, the basis of a thousand year-old social order.

  How could he have stooped so low as to make a pact with that damned laowai?

  Guo was so agitated that he wasn’t able to enjoy the piping hot shark fin soup he had been served.

  Zou Kai had just called to update him on the failure of their mission: they had not managed to retrieve Longhin, the traitor. They got there too late and now, because of them, the clan was empty-handed. Guo knew that his honour was at stake, in his own mind and in those of all the Talking Daggers. And of course the other Chinese gangs in the Italian north east would soon notice such a fissure in the structure of his organisation.

  The fact that he felt responsible for that disaster wouldn’t save Zou Kai from being punished for failure to perform his assigned task. But it was clear to him that such punishment would be pointless, compared to rewinding and going back in time to rectify previous mistakes.