“Making the most of hard-earned savings.”
“As I see it, Pellegrini was paying him cash in hand. I’ll leave it to you to find out why,” he added, handing me a folded sheet of paper that contained all the information we needed to find the guy.
“You can count on us,” I said.
I finished my cappuccino and stood up, but Campagna was quick. We stood face to face.
“Listen, Buratti, I have my own plan to get out of this fucked-up situation without winding up in jail or being kicked off the force, and you’re not part of it.”
“All right.”
“I’ll do what they ordered me to. And I want it to be clear that if you manage to screw over Dottoressa Marino, I’ll be pleased to no end. But nothing is going to make me team up with three crooks.”
“You made yourself clear. But we need to know what’s going on at the station and what plot that witch is hatching. And you need to do us the favor of keeping us up to date. Otherwise we’re hopeless.”
“You’re asking too much.”
“You can’t become Angela Marino’s accomplice. You’re as fond of her maneuvering as I am.”
“It makes me shudder, Buratti, but she’s my superior and we both serve the state.”
“And Pellegrini. In the end he’s the one who really stands to gain.”
He stepped aside to let me pass.
Before leaving, I gave him a warning. “Don’t put us in a position where we have nothing to lose. And stop insulting us. You’re trying my patience.”
The morning frost blotched the faces of the market vendors in Piazza della Frutta. The sun had put in a shy appearance, and many clients, especially the older ones, wouldn’t risk sticking their noses out of the house.
I stopped at the café where I got my cigarettes. A couple packs and another coffee. The slot machines were all taken by people banking on the pipedream that they’d get lucky that morning. The kid behind the bar pointed at a woman in line at the cash register who was waiting to break a ten-euro bill.
“She’s new,” he said, “name’s Nora. Has a studio apartment around the corner. She’s Italian, and so are her clients. No blacks, no Moroccans, no Slavs. Rubbers mandatory.”
The woman realized she was the subject of our conversation and turned so we could peep her profile. She wasn’t young anymore and couldn’t have been turning tricks for long.
“You her pimp?” I asked.
“Let’s just say I’m helping her get on her feet.”
The area was too central to be controlled by organized crews. Prostitution was tolerated if practiced with discretion for a limited period of time. Soon as the pursuit became remunerative, someone always came knocking.
The woman smiled awkwardly. In time she’d get the swing of it and her smile would become so fake that she could flaunt it, like her expert colleagues, a healthy dose of contempt for the men who paid to go to bed with her.
“Two cubs in the lion’s den,” I whispered to her young, green guardian.
He took offense and turned to another client, she went back to sliding coins into the slot machine, and I promised myself once again that I’d never set foot in that café.
The waiter at La Nena lived in a congested area on the city’s east end, in a house built in the 1960s that looked as if it had been designed by a child. Blocky, simple, basic. It needed a new paint job; the walls were a depressing shade of gray. It stood in the middle of a large green space, partly occupied by a prefab garage and partly by a well-tended kitchen garden.
We should have staked the place out, studied the man’s movements, and chosen the right moment to approach him, but it was too cold, and for some reason we felt protected by the cops. If Zorzi complained, we could always justify ourselves by dragging in Campagna and Dottoressa Marino.
So all three of us showed up at his gate, ringing the bell with zeal. The waiter usually left for work at that hour, but the restaurant was still closed, and there was no sign that he’d found a new job.
One of the curtains fluttered; I pressed down on the doorbell.
A little later the door opened and the man approached. He was bundled up in a designer down jacket but all he had on his feet were brown rubber clogs. He couldn’t have been taller than five-seven, not fat, not skinny, an unremarkable face.
“What do you want?” he asked in dialect.
“Why don’t you let us in?” asked Rossini politely.
“I know you,” he said. “I saw you at La Nena. What do you want?”
He wasn’t ruffled. He knew perfectly well who we were, and yet we hadn’t set foot in La Nena more than two or three times. I shot my partners a look, then improvised. “You used to be Pellegrini’s right-hand man. He slipped you an extra cut. Till now things were going your way, but we need some information.”
“I don’t know anything,” he interrupted.
I shook my head and stared him in the eye. “As I was saying, we can make your life hell and call the cops in to interrogate you about how you managed to buy those apartments that you rent to students.”
He didn’t bother to respond. He remained unruffled. While he listened, he looked us over, his head at a slight tilt.
“Tell us what you know and we’ll leave you be,” Max added calmly.
I’d come across guys like Zorzi before. Anonymous, nothing about them to pique your interest. Silent, always knew their place. But scratch the surface and you begin to realize you’re dealing with hard-asses who think like seasoned gangsters, because that’s what they’ve always been, and no one ever bothered to notice.
Old Rossini had already sized him up and changed tack. “You were good at going undetected. And we want to treat you with the respect you deserve. You don’t owe Pellegrini anything anymore. The restaurant’s closed and won’t reopen. We’re investigating the murders of Martina and Gemma, and we know how close you were to them.”
Only then did Zorzi’s face betray a dash of humanity. “The ladies were good people, kind. They listened to me.”
“It was Giorgio Pellegrini who told you to keep an eye on them, wasn’t it?” asked Beniamino, treading lightly. “At first he took care of it, but then he passed on the task to you because you were the only one he trusted.”
The waiter nodded and Rossini seized on the opening. “Help us find the killers. We’re not cops. If we find them, we’ll make them pay.”
“Giorgio said you guys are bad business,” he said, gauging our reactions. “That you’ve got unfriendly intentions.”
“If I find him I’ll kill him,” admitted Beniamino. “But we’re not interested in him right now. We want to get hold of the pieces of shit who tortured, raped, and killed the two ladies.”
“Your friends threatened me,” Zorzi pointed out. “They owe me an apology.”
“You’re right, they don’t know how to conduct themselves, because they’re not professionals,” Beniamino explained. “But you and I are, we understood one another immediately.”
Satisfied, the man snorted and picked out a key from a rather voluminous ring. He led us into a large living room heated by a majolica stove. The wife must have done the decorating; chintzy as it was, it had personality. Looking around, I realized that while the exterior of the house appeared as modest as its owner, every last detail of the interior smacked of luxury.
He signaled for us to take the couch and sat down on an armchair opposite.
He didn’t offer us anything and came straight to the point. “The person you’re looking for is a woman,” he said flatly. “I noticed her the first time she came to lunch at La Nena. She looked distracted, but nothing escaped her notice. Plus she didn’t take her eyes off the two ladies. Not in a conspicuous way, but I caught it. I figured she was either a cop or a spy.”
“The restaurant was always full. How did you notice her?” I asked.
/> He smiled. “Scoping people out was my job. Giorgio paid me to identify personae non gratae.”
“Even after he fled?” I asked.
“That’s none of your fucking business.”
I didn’t press him; his answer was more than sufficient.
“How many times did the woman come to the restaurant?” asked Max.
“A couple of lunches, often during happy hour, and dinner on odd days the first week, even days the second. By the third week she was gone. On Wednesday the women were murdered.”
“Can you describe her?”
He pulled a phone out of his pants pocket. “I can do better than that. I took two photos,” he replied casually. “I showed them to the ladies so that they knew not to talk to her. But it was too late. She’d already feigned an interest in the old building and gotten them to show her the cellar.”
That dispelled any lingering doubts about the mystery woman; clearly she was the scout working for the killers.
It was the wrong question, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut: “Why didn’t you give the photos to the police?”
He stared at me a moment with a disgusted look on his face, then started swiping through the photos on his phone.
The phone was passed around, and when it came around to me I found myself looking at a close-up of a forty-something with short jet-black hair. Her eyes were black too. Her face was round, full, olive-skinned. She wore too much makeup, bold lipstick that didn’t suit her. My guard was up, because I was positive she’d paved the way for the killers, but, despite my resistance, I had to admit she was attractive. In the other image she was standing. She wasn’t tall but well proportioned. She wore designer clothes, strictly black save for her shoes, a pair of beige pumps with a real high heel.
It was a fair guess that the clothes were a far cry from what she normally wore. I wondered about her actual tastes. Zorzi asked Rossini for his number so that he could send him the photos, and Rossini sent them to us.
The waiter stood up. “I’ll walk you out,” he said icily. A last courtesy. That was all the help we’d get from him.
As Zorzi was about to shut the double-lock gate, Rossini turned around to shake his hand. “Thank you and goodbye,” he said, making it clear that we wouldn’t trouble him again.
Back in the car I let him have it: “Since when do we defer to a guy who works for Pellegrini?”
As Beniamino lit a cigarette, his shirt cuff slipped down, bringing his bracelets into full view. “Sometimes good manners get you further than threats. Besides, that guy’s bad news. We’re better off not making enemies with him.”
I sent the photos of the mysterious woman to Campagna along with a message: “Need ID.”
The Fat Man sighed. “It would have been easier to kill the ladies in their apartment. Instead the killers wanted to avail themselves of the cellar to buy themselves time and muffle the noise.”
“So?”
“Two considerations. The first we know already: strangling them on Pellegrini’s turf was symbolic. The second is that the pretty brunette in the photo picked the place. She’s not a scout, she’s a boss. I bet she participated in the killings. Forensics found a size eight footprint.”
“Maybe she’s a smaller size,” I thought out loud, studying the feet of the girl on my phone. “But an insole and thick socks are all you need to wear a shoe that suggests a man and not a woman was there.”
“You’re right, Max,” the Old Gangster agreed. “She acted like she ran the operation. She checked out places, alternatives, escape routes. Clearly she’s the kind of person who doesn’t trust anybody. But I don’t get why she let herself be seen so many times in the restaurant. In the end someone noticed her, and now we know what she looks like.”
“It was a risk she had to take if she wanted to have everything under control,” speculated the Fat Man.
“Or else this was personal,” I hazarded, “and she wanted to expose herself to settle a score with Handsome Giorgio. We all know Pellegrini has a real talent for making people want to kill him.”
“Motives aside, I’m sure Pellegrini knows her,” said Beniamino. “If Campagna can’t ID the woman, we can always ask Marino to show Pellegrini the photo.”
I turned around to gauge his expression. Not a hint of irony. “You’re joking, right?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Depends how we ask,” continued Rossini.
“You want to trigger a war with the wicked witch?” I asked, stunned.
“We’ve got to get it through to her that if she wants to nail us on this, it won’t be easy.”
He sensed my perplexity.
“We’re not aboveboard, Marco. Much less cops. We don’t think like them. And that difference could save our ass.”
“I’d like to remind you that Marino is ready to pin three kilos of cocaine on us whenever the spirit moves her.”
“Well, seeing as she had the decency to tell us what crime she plans to pin on us, we ought to pick up the pace.”
I had to agree, yet I was still praying to the gods that Campagna could ID the woman.
A few minutes later the inspector called with disappointing news. “All the powerful means at my disposal won’t allow me to adequately search for this woman.”
“Ask Marino.”
The detective dropped the call without another word.
“On to Plan B,” I said to the Old Gangster.
I rang again. “Don’t hang up, Campagna.”
“You’re wasting my time, Buratti.”
“What are you talking about? They took you off all your cases,” I shot back. “You don’t want me complaining to the Dottoressa, do you?”
“What do you want?” he huffed.
“Is Marino in Padua?”
“Maybe,” he answered suspiciously.
“Where do I find her?”
“At the station.”
I lost my cool. “How long are we going to play this little game?”
“First you tell me why you want to know where she lives.”
“We need to talk to her.”
“I’ll relay the message. Maybe.”
That time, I hung up.
“What a dick!” I hissed.
“The more they fuck him over, the tighter he clings to his badge,” remarked Beniamino.
Max had worked up an appetite. He mentioned a restaurant in the area known for baccalà alla vicentina, but it was too early to sit down to eat, so he took out a few sheets of notebook paper from his inside pocket. “We’re going shopping,” he announced.
Old Rossini and I protested, but the Fat Man wouldn’t budge. “We’ve got nothing at home and I’m always the one stocking up on supplies. Only seems fair that I take advantage of this moment when we’re all together.”
Beniamino made a clumsy attempt to wiggle his way out of it. “I don’t live with you.”
“It’s true. You go back to your place a couple of days each week,” said Max.
I peeped the list. “One cart won’t do the trick, am I right?”
The Fat Man chuckled. “Afraid not.”
An hour later we stepped out of the supermarket loaded up like packhorses, ventured into the large parking garage, and found Campagna leaning against Beniamino’s sedan, his arms crossed and a wry look on his face.
“How’d you find us?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“I’m good.”
“Whose phone are you tracing?”
“Yours.”
“Bullshit,” said Beniamino icily. “An hour tops before we pop your balloon.”
“If I were you I might also have a look at this pretty little car,” suggested the detective.
Giulio Campagna was a complicated man.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why are you telling us your colleagues planted a tracking device on my friend’s car?”
He raised his left thumb to list the reasons. “First, Marino’s men aren’t colleagues, they’re dangerous aliens from distant galaxies deep in the Ministry of the Interior.” He stuck out his index finger. “Second, I’d give the world to show you that while you might think you’re criminal masterminds, you’re really nothing more than three dumbfucks.”
Beniamino clenched his fists and stepped forward, ready to land a right to the stomach and a left to the chin. I’d seen him do it before. Campagna was expecting it and pulled his gun out in time. Luckily, he didn’t point it at him.
“Don’t try it,” he muttered. “A crook hasn’t laid a hand on me my entire career.”
“I’ll ram that toy up your ass,” replied Beniamino, entirely unfazed. “That’ll teach you to act properly.”
I stepped between them. “Put the piece away,” I demanded. “Thanks for the heads-up, but as I already pointed out to you, you have a bad habit of casting nasty aspersions. And not everybody is as forgiving as I am.”
The standard-issue Beretta was returned to its holster.
“Let’s talk about serious matters,” said Campagna, keeping an eye on Old Rossini. “If you succeed in creating a channel to Marino, I’m happy. The farther away from this mess I am, the better my chances of getting out of it. But clearly I can’t give you information about her. She’d immediately know it was me.”
“So then?” I asked.
“I’ll show you the road and you take it from there.”
“And where would this road happen to lead?”
“To Sergeant Francesco Marmorato and Special Agent Lorenzo Pitta. They’re her shadows.”
Marmorato had greeted me with a pat down when I’d met Marino. Pitta must have been the driver. But I’d barely glimpsed the guy and wouldn’t be able to recognize him.
“They’re posted at the barracks in Celere and eat dinner nearby at Cosimo’s,” he explained. “The owner, Cosimo Stella, is Marmorato’s compaesano.”
Blues for Outlaw Hearts and Old Whores Page 4