Blues for Outlaw Hearts and Old Whores

by Massimo Carlotto

  “You’re free to tell them that we have information about the man in Padua,” I said. “It’s the truth. And if you vouch for our seriousness, I don’t foresee any problems.”

  “All right.”

  Pretending to pay the bill, Martinenghi reached into his pocket and placed a cell phone on the table, which disappeared inside Max’s jacket. “Make sure it’s always on,” he instructed.

  We ordered another round of coffee.

  “We did well going to Pierino,” said the Fat Man, satisfied. “He’s all right.”

  “Old guard,” Rossini said with pride. “On their way to extinction, but a couple of them are left.”

  I peeped what the safecracker had written on the napkin.

  “Do we have any idea where Oswaldgasse in Altmannsdorf is?”

  “No,” replied Max, taking the tablet out of his bag. “But we’ll soon find out.”

  “Check out how to reach the area by public transit,” added Beniamino. “The time has come to move with a minimum of caution.”

  The neighborhood was in Meidling, Vienna’s twelfth district. The apartment was on the second floor of a building mostly inhabited by young couples, close to stores and bars that we’d never set foot in. No point in drawing attention to yourself around your hideout.

  Entrance, living room, kitchen, three bedrooms, two toilets, and a balcony equipped with a capacious ashtray. A handwritten sign informed us smoking was prohibited. No doubt we’d break that rule. We’d make amends with a bottle of the good stuff and a card.

  We picked our rooms and unpacked the few things we’d brought with us. We didn’t have the slightest idea how long we’d be staying in Austria, but traveling light was imperative. Anything else we could pick up in loco.

  I stretched out on the bed and caught up on a little sleep, skipping lunch. I still hadn’t digested the Krapfen I’d polished off.

  Midafternoon I took a shower and shaved. The store-bought shaving cream and disposable razor gave me no satisfaction. Once again it dawned on me that the time to shave was in the morning, soon as you’re up, when your skin’s refreshed. I’d read it on a blog where shaving fanatics bandied about different schools of thought.

  The house was empty. My friends had gone out, but in the kitchen I discovered they’d already taken care of the shopping. I snacked on crackers and an Austrian version of Liptauer. The abundance of cumin muffled the taste of sheep’s-milk cheese. Sort of. To tell the truth, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d never been a gourmet. I washed down this latest dilemma with a couple of glasses of Riesling. I smoked and watched a heavy mix of rain and snow fall and melt the minute it hit the ground.

  After a while I grew tired. It was one of those days I didn’t even want to think. Or listen to music. I would have gone back to bed and woken up the following morning after a deep, dreamless sleep, but a phone rang. The ringtone was an hysterical version of a well-known polka the name of which I couldn’t remember. “Rosamunde” maybe. I listened to the jingle and spotted the source on the table in the entrance. It was the phone Martinenghi gave us.

  “I spoke to those people,” he said. “They seemed interested. The meet is tonight, 10 P.M., at a hotel bar near the Schottenring station.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “Not all three of you,” he clarified. “The deal was one person from each party.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “I figured.”

  “You know the place?”

  “I’m the one who chose it. It’s packed with high rollers, and management is very discreet.”

  I was surprised. I’d been expecting a long, unsettling wait, and instead they’d agreed to meet us right away.

  They took Pierino at his word. And the chance to get information about Slezak’s killer must have thrilled them.

  A little later my partners returned. They’d gone to get a car. Our trusted car smuggler, Dario Tomasella, knew a guy in Lienz who had a cousin in Vienna—

  I cut short Rossini’s story with a wave of my hand. There’s nothing more tedious and complicated than the web of who-knows-who in the crime world. “Did you find one?”

  Beniamino looked at Max and smiled. “You’ll be pleased to hear we have a Škoda.”

  “A Superb, not a Felicia, the latest model,” said the Fat Man.

  “Clean?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” replied the Old Gangster. “We parked it in a garage not too close, but at least we have a vehicle ready in case of emergencies. Tomorrow morning I have a meeting with a guy to get a couple of pistols.”

  “I already aired my disapproval,” Max interrupted. “What if they were already used for dirty work?”

  “Gun prices in Vienna are outrageous,” objected Rossini. “Besides, I doubt we’ll need them. Plus we’re short on money.”

  I turned to the Fat Man; he handled the purse strings. “How much is left?”

  He cleared his throat. “27,800 euros. Plus change.”

  “What?” I shouted. “This shit is costing us a fortune.”

  “It’s been a bit since we’ve had revenue,” observed Beniamino. “Pretty soon I’ll have to pull a heist so we’re not forced to beg.”

  I peeped the clock and switched the subject. “In a couple hours I’m meeting a member of Paz Anaya Vega’s organization.”

  “Then you better rehearse your lines before you go on,” advised the Fat Man.

  The hotel was housed inside a majestic nineteenth-century building. The pomp and circumstance of imperial Vienna remained visible despite a few obvious modern upgrades to the building’s structure and design. The whole Central European arrangement was tasteful. The bar was particularly inviting, the music just the right volume for savoring a drop in blessed peace. It was a joint for real drinkers. Solitaries too. My kind of place. The kind where everybody can safely assume that behind people’s thirst there’s serious, complicated, painful business going on, which a drink can make more tolerable. And no one dares pass judgment.

  I breathed in the air and caught the scent of spiced tobacco; someone here was a fan of the legendary Balkan Sobranie. Thick white columns of smoke rose from the middle of the room where a man with a pipe sat. I remembered then that in Austria the smoking prohibition had been put off for another couple of years, but I’d left my pack in my coat pocket. I may be an inveterate smoker but abusing tobacco is my choice. Anyone who works in bars has the right to not breathe my smoke. Alcohol would do me.

  The two barmen weren’t green; they knew their trade. I sat down on a high stool at the bar and pointed to a bottle of Calvados Roger Groult, which came served in the proper glass—a real rarity. I shook my head firmly when the other bartender tried to talk me into pairing my nectar with dark chocolate from Tuscany, just as a celebrity chef had suggested on TV.

  It wasn’t the finest chocolate, sure, but more to the point, apple brandy’s got nothing to do with cacao. Max was right: In the name of taste people had lost their minds and the world was now full of bullshit gurus steering the market. They tout the highest standards and then make a killing advertising products for the most toxic food industries.

  Fortunately the Roger Groult didn’t disappoint. I sucked it down and asked the bartender to top me off. I had time. I’d arrived a good half hour early.

  The envoy of the outfit turned up on time. I spotted him a mile away: sixty-five-ish, past exploits with biker gangs written all over him. Tall, burly, he was dressed head to toe in dark leather. Handlebar moustache. Apart from his bald crown, he had shoulder-length hair, which he dyed brick red in an effort to recapture a color that had faded a long time ago.

  I’d been expecting someone less conspicuous but noticed that no one took much interest in him.

  He sat down at an empty table and ordered a beer. I walked over and took the seat across from him.

  “I’m Marc
o,” I said, introducing myself in English and extending a hand.

  “You can call me Abo,” he said in decent Italian, inflected with a dialect that I couldn’t quite pin down.

  He could tell I was curious. “I served five years in the tank at Ascoli Piceno,” he explained with a frown.

  “One of the less welcoming,” I remarked.

  “I don’t have fond memories of Italy.”

  The same bartender who had served me brought him a vodka tonic.

  “Thanks for taking this meeting,” I said out of respect for good manners.

  Abo appreciated it. “We’re willing to pay large for information on the guy . . . as long as we’re talking about the same person.”

  “Giorgio Pellegrini.”

  “That’s him, the very same piece of shit.”

  It pleased me to find that Handsome Giorgio made friends wherever he went. “We’re not selling information,” I clarified. “We want to propose teaming up to locate and eliminate him.”

  He took a drink and dipped his fat finger in a bowl of cashews. “We might be interested, but I’d have to talk with my bosses. They only sent me because I speak your language.”

  He was lying. They’d never have sent an errand boy. Our man had to be able to check the quality of what we were offering. And to do that, he needed to know every last detail of the score.

  Obviously I played along. I laid an ace on the table so that he understood we were serious. “Pellegrini’s working for the cops. He’s at the center of a major undercover operation run by the Italian Ministry of the Interior.”

  The Austrian blanched at this bit of news. It meant not only did they risk losing a boss and two affiliates, but that the Italian police could provide their Austrian counterparts with proof of the crew’s criminal activity. Pellegrini’s testimony would be the killshot.

  “You sure?” he asked anxiously.

  “Positive.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Your turn.”

  He nodded. “Pellegrini shows up in Vienna out of the blue, calling himself Attilio Sforza,” he began. “He puts the word out that he’s looking to score a big batch of coke. Because one of our old clients said he knew him well, we took it into consideration. We turned it inside out, but his story held up. Now I know why: he had the Italian police behind him.”

  “Your client really played you for suckers.”

  “Once we found him he confessed it was Interpol that forced him to vouch for Sforza.”

  “And he didn’t testify against you?”

  “No. We didn’t eliminate him either. There’s dirt on him only we know about, and he can’t afford for it to be aired in a courtroom.”

  Must’ve been hell, I thought, being double-blackmailed by people who were fighting an all-out war, but I wasn’t there to make small talk.

  “Ultimately Tobias decided to close the deal, but Pellegrini tricked him and killed him and two other comrades,” he said, almost choking up. “One was my son-in-law Guntmar. Left my daughter Sabine all alone with two little kids.”

  He raised his glass. I half-heartedly raised my own. “To Guntmar,” he said softly.

  After a long swig, he was ready to go on.

  “Pellegrini ran off with the money but left four kilos of quality coke. His one objective was to murder Tobias. We ran a probe to figure out whether he had backers or was acting out a personal vendetta, but until today all we’d managed to discover was his true identity.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  He shrugged. “We contacted one of the many companies in Moscow that traffic in the world of ‘communications.’ Two days later we knew all about Pellegrini. We won’t make the same mistake twice. Next time we’ll go straight to the Russians.”

  “We’ll give you our coordinates to make the job easier,” I said, as if it were the norm. In truth, I was fed up. I didn’t like the idea of Russian hackers sticking their noses into our lives, our business. You couldn’t trust them. There was no way of foreseeing how they’d use the information. In just a few years they’d become so effective, so brazen as to interfere in the elections of the most powerful country on earth.

  He smiled. “We’ve already made inquiries based on what Martinenghi gave us.”

  “Seems fair,” I let slip.

  Abo ordered another round and politely bid me to continue our exchange of information. The time had come to furnish him with the worst news. I took out my phone and showed the Austrian the photo of Paz Anaya Vega taken at La Nena.

  “We know it was you who butchered the wife and lover. Martina and Gemma were their names, and they didn’t deserve that horrible end,” I said sternly.

  The man didn’t blink. His eyes, however, gleamed with satisfaction. I knew then that he’d been there that night in Padua to avenge his son-in-law. Once again I cursed Giorgio Pellegrini for forcing me to mix with people this repugnant.

  “The Italian police are also in possession of the photo. It was taken by one of Pellegrini’s accomplices,” I added, exhibiting the same cool. “There’s probably a warrant out on Paz already. In Italy that amounts to a life sentence.”

  Abo was shaken. Now there were no lingering doubts that their organization would be wiped out by a joint Austrian-Italian operation.

  I twisted the knife. “You went to all that trouble proving you were a big-time operation, and then the Spaniard gets made at the scene of the crime. You slaughtered two unarmed women and now you’ve been had. Maybe you’re not so clever after all.”

  “Then why did you come looking for us?”

  “Thanks to Pellegrini we’re looking at jail time too,” I replied. “The only way out of this for both of us is to kill him.”

  He drained his glass and grunted: “I’ll let you know.” He was in a hurry to get out of there, tell the others what he’d just learned, and take action to salvage what was left to salvage.

  But I wasn’t done. “Next time I want to meet Paz Anaya Vega. And I want you to tell her we don’t take kindly to drug traffickers and we don’t kill innocent bystanders.”

  He grabbed me by the collar of my coat. “You’re getting on my nerves,” he spat, brandishing his left fist. On his middle and ring fingers he wore large rings topped with roughly cut rhinestones. Deadly weapons in the hands of a street fighter.

  I looked around us. “We’re in the bar of a luxury hotel,” I reminded him.

  He regained his composure, and I made myself even more explicit. “If Paz wants a deal, she’s got to keep in mind that pointless killings won’t be tolerated.”

  Abo stood up. He took a few bills out of his wallet and tossed them on the table: “We’ll get in touch through Martinenghi.” He walked off with his head down, like a bull about to charge.

  Had we brokered an alliance, things would have still turned out badly. We had no intention of forgetting the murders of Martina and Gemma.

  I wouldn’t have made our feelings so obvious on the first meeting, but Old Rossini was adamant: respect the rules, whatever the cost. If you have to strike a deal with an enemy, you better make it clear your principles are legit and always will be.

  Rules. No one respects them anymore. They’re so far removed from the new criminal mindset that it’s become difficult to explain them. Insisting they be respected in good faith is out of the question; inevitably, you have to flex your muscles.

  I finished my third Calvados. If I wanted to have a fourth or fifth and still return home with my dignity intact, I’d have to take precautions. The bartender sensed this immediately and rushed to bring me a bottle of water and a club sandwich.

  A classic remedy, obviously, the best thing to prepare one’s stomach for another drink: three wedges of white bread, crisp bacon, a slice of turkey, tomato, lettuce, and condiments. I added a shot of Tabasco—my personal touch.

  It w
as at that moment I saw a woman enter and head over to the bar. I still didn’t know that my life would change, and I was more interested in my stomach than in her. I watched her chat with the bartender then turn to have a look around the room. I could tell immediately that she was a working girl scoping the place for clients. I carried on eating, thinking about Abo, Paz, and Pellegrini. She had the bartender pour two fingers of amber liquor that I couldn’t identify and went back to looking at the men sitting alone.

  She had three options: yours truly, the gentleman with the pipe, and another guy, probably American, wearing a Pork Pie hat that barely rested on his ash-colored moptop and drinking a Bloody Mary.

  I wagered she’d make her way to my table. Instead she set her sights on the guy with the hat, but after a minute he began apologizing and gesticulating wildly. He wanted to be left alone.

  The woman looked in my direction, and, as a courtesy, I invited her to join my table.

  “My name’s Edith,” she said, still on her feet. “And you?”

  Her English was uninflected, and a cone of shadow made it impossible for me to make her out. “Marco,” I replied. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

  “Because you’re eating to keep from getting drunk.”

  “So?”

  “Men are a drag in general, but when they drink they get violent. They insult you or hurt you and then blame it on booze.”

  That was the truth, and it was pointless to swear that I was different, that she wasn’t running any risks with me. She didn’t know me, and I didn’t want to sleep with her anyways.

  “So your only other option is the gentleman with the pipe.”

  “I know him,” she said. “He comes here once a month and sits there drinking and smoking while he waits on a lady. They always get the same room. 309. I’ve been in it and I don’t see what’s so special.”

  “I guess it’ll remain a mystery.”

  She shrugged and gave a sigh of disappointment while checking out the clientele again.