Blues for Outlaw Hearts and Old Whores

by Massimo Carlotto

  “I have to admit, I let myself get played, and that’ll damage my good name and my business.”

  “Do you really think your outfit will survive?”

  “No, but that’s exactly why I have to consider the future.”

  “You can’t turn the page until after you’ve avenged the death of your man Tobias.”

  She made a show of putting her hand to her heart.

  “You’re so right, I forgot I was a poor inconsolable widow.”

  I’d asked for it. A cloying appeal to her feelings was a misstep.

  “I’ll take your advice,” she said, picking up her purse.

  She was about to leave but changed her mind.

  “You’re a real strange crew: you play multiple tables at a time, have a direct line to the cops who killed Tobias, and, despite counting for shit, you have the balls to let me know I deserve to die,” she whispered. “I should kill you just for being an anomaly. But if I find Pellegrini, I’ll let it go.”

  Before I could respond, I caught the guile in her eyes. We’d sidestepped the trap she’d set for us in Sopron, but she had no intention of forgetting about us. For all the reasons she’d just listed.

  Paz Anaya Vega was all pride and power on her way out. And I breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn’t wait to step outside and have a smoke. I asked for the check, but the bartender told me not to worry, the woman had a running tab at the hotel. I left a large tip anyway. On my way to the coat check I ran into Edith. She was leaning against a wall, the amber glow from a lampshade lit her face, now pinched, glaring, disgusted. She’d seen me with Paz Anaya Vega and now she was sure that I was a dangerous, evil man.

  I would have gone to her to assuage her feelings but I was afraid I was being watched and walked on past. With a heavy heart.

  Beniamino stood up as soon as he saw me. He flashed a smile at the two assholes and followed me out. Max pulled up, and we drove off after checking to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  “So?” asked the Fat Man. “Anyone want to tell me what happened?”

  “You should have seen how she looked at me. Repulsed.”

  “Who, the Spaniard?”

  “No. Edith.”

  Old Rossini, sitting in back, reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Now’s not the time, Marco,” he said coolly. “We can talk about it at the house, but now you’ve got to focus. Call the cop.”

  I pulled out the phone that I used to communicate with Campagna. To snap out of it, I lit a cigarette and smoked half.

  “I don’t suffer from insomnia and now that I’m cashing checks for nothing I go to bed without a care,” the inspector started yakking.

  “We found Paz Anaya Vega,” I cut in.

  “Where?”

  “In Vienna.”

  “So that’s where you’ve been holed up. Marino will be glad to know you didn’t change your identity and flee the continent. She calls me every day asking for news.”

  “She’s not back in Padua?”

  “No. And I can’t say I miss her.”

  “Tell her for the moment she doesn’t need to fear for Pellegrini’s life,” I lied. “The Spaniard has more pressing issues to resolve.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “An old lieutenant of the dearly departed Tobias Slezak wants to take her out, and Paz isn’t at liberty to leave the city.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. We’ve done what we were blackmailed to do,” I said. “Now it’s Marino’s turn to keep up her end of the bargain. We’re through with her fucking schemes.”

  “I’ll pass it on. But if I were you I’d be in no rush to get back home,” he said before hanging up.

  We weren’t that stupid. We would stay and watch. And in the meantime we’d take care of Edith.

  Paz was right: we were playing multiple tables at a time.

  FIVE

  I went on the lam three days and three nights. I switched off the cellphone that I used to communicate with Dottoressa Marino and lost Serj Balakian’s men. After recouping my fake documents and money, which I’d had the foresight to stash in a locker at the train station upon arriving in Munich, I checked into a room at a shoddy B&B near Dachau. Then I returned to Munich by train and hunted for a safe place to hide if things went south.

  But that wasn’t my only reason. I needed to pry loose from that claustrophobic situation, where I was under surveillance day and night. I know myself too well. I can’t handle psychological stress for long. Plus I wanted to send a message to beautiful, know-it-all Angela Marino, who took a free and easy attitude toward an informer like me. Last, I had to teach Balakian’s skinny bitch a thing or two about life; she presumed to give me lessons on behaving like a fugitive—a way of convincing her boss that the time had come to quit with the foreplay and meet face to face. Then I’d have his ass. I couldn’t wait to get back to my life as a respectable, hardworking, and honest citizen of the Italian Republic.

  Survival is a subject I could teach at the best colleges. The only way to hide in a large European city with a good degree of safety and elude high-class criminal organizations on your tail and cops armed with sophisticated means was to fly under the radar. Don’t use IDs, ATMs, credit cards, cellphones. Don’t sleep at hotels, rent apartments, or buy or lease cars. And don’t surf the Internet. I had to turn the clock back twenty years.

  The best safehouse is a room to rent in a private home. But not just any home. Avoid families and couples like the plague. Look for single women in their fifties and sixties. After two mornings and two afternoons I’d zeroed in on five, but only one, Toska Köhler, had passed the first tests.

  A widow for six years, retired one. Her closest relatives lived hundreds of miles away. The minute I entered her house I saw signs of loneliness and resignation in her face. It was clear she’d expected more from life and couldn’t figure out why that hadn’t come to pass. Her decision to rent a room in her apartment wasn’t a matter of money but a practical means of breaking up the monotony and warding off ghosts that can complicate one’s ability to carry on. I made an appearance of being polite, courteous, and a touch indecisive. I told her I came from Lugano and was looking for a place to stay in the city while I pursued my sommelier business, the one profession I could credibly lay claim to thanks to my lengthy tenure at La Nena. I got her talking about regional wine and gauged how pliable she was. She proved to be a malleable subject.

  I acted hard to please about the room: the furniture arrangement wouldn’t do, the TV wasn’t up to my standards. She was accommodating about every last detail. She didn’t want me going elsewhere.

  She had raved about the neighborhood in the online ad I’d found: “Scwabing-West: young, quiet, safe.”

  When she served me crap coffee with some simple honey and cinnamon cookies that she’d made with her own little hands, I administered the killshot: I asked her if there were any movie theaters or playhouses in the area. She lit up. She pictured the two of us going together!

  Rent was seven hundred euro. I paid for the first three months in cash, slept there the first night, and told her I’d be back soon. We could work out the details then, I added. She didn’t bat an eye.

  I was handsome, charming, elegant. I looked respectable. Toska was already at my feet. She would put me up for as long as I needed, and I would exceed her wildest expectations. All of them. Her life would no longer be governed by a flat, gray, dreary ordinariness. If she survived, she’d never forget me.

  The productive break had done me good. When I opened the door to the apartment in Neuperlach, I was back to the old Giorgio Pellegrini. I curled my lip to find that the place had been ransacked, and this time they hadn’t worried about covering their tracks. Balakian must have beaten the guys tailing me for having lost me in an underground parking lot, and they had taken their revenge by throwing coffee and sugar all ov
er the floor.

  The minute I turned my phone back on I heard a long series of beeps. My “sweetheart” had written me earnest messages begging me to contact her, saying she couldn’t live without me. Marino outdid herself. She’d managed to bury her unprecedented anger under a mountain of mawkishness.

  “Ciao, amore mio.”

  “I’m so happy to hear your voice,” she chirped. “I was worried about you. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “I arrived in Munich yesterday.”

  “Imagine that!” I cried, pretending to be happy.

  “We have to see each other. I’m at Saint Michael’s Church. You know he’s my favorite saint.”

  I didn’t doubt it; he was the patron saint of cops, after all. But translating her code for emergencies, the message meant something else entirely. I had to head out to a spot in Sophienstraße.

  Thirty minutes later I was ready to play cat-and-mouse with Balakian’s men, standing in Marienplatz, where the usual throngs of tourists were milling about. I cut west in the direction of Saint Michael’s Church, but at Neuhauserstraße I pulled a rabbit out of my hat and literally vanished into thin air. By a long, circuitous route I arrived in Karsplatz and crossed the Alter Botanischer Garten. Sergeant Marmorato was there to make sure no one was shadowing me. A few minutes later, I entered the Park Café.

  I recognized another cop, Pitta, pretending to check his phone by the entrance. Angela Marino was waiting for me at a table in a far corner to the right of the large lunch counter.

  As I approached I realized that I’d been a naughty boy for running off. The haggard look on her face, the baggy eyes, the pale lips—clearly she’d been through hell. Which was understandable, after all: the outcome of an important sting operation depends entirely on one man, and should he decide to duck out right in the middle of things, it could blow someone’s career.

  I didn’t stand on ceremony or mince words: “Don’t start busting my balls with your threats. I’ve shown you I could care less.”

  “So I’m to assume that this getaway wasn’t just some bumbling fuck up but meant to teach me a lesson,” she replied ironically.

  “Exactly.”

  She crossed her hands under her chin. Another pose in her repertoire. She didn’t wear rings and her pale pink nail polish was in urgent need of repair. Personally, I’d have replaced it with a bolder color.

  “I’m listening, Giorgio.”

  “I want to know the whole truth about this operation and most of all I want guarantees.”

  “Did I hear you right? Did you say ‘guarantees’?”

  She couldn’t help it. Spite was her forte.

  “I realized a long time ago that you had it in for me. But if you want to play out this scene with Balakian, we have to set straight how I walk away with immunity.”

  “We’ve been over this before.”

  “All I heard were vague promises that reeked of a raw deal. I want all the details or I’m not moving a finger until I’m in possession of a document signed by a judge, preferably a federal judge. You get the point: someone heavy.”

  She shook her head and looked at me as if she were an adult who couldn’t get through to a teenage boy.

  “You know it doesn’t work that way,” she began. “In our country you don’t get immunity the way you do in the United States. You’ll have to submit to being placed under arrest, confess, and testify at trial. Then you’ll be set free, and we’ll provide you with a new identity.”

  Then you’ll be set free. That’s where the raw deal lay hidden. Not only was she unsure when that would happen, but another charge would be enough to keep me locked up for who knows how long.

  “I’ve already been an informant once.”

  “I’m well aware.”

  “And I have no intention of playing that role again and rotting in a cell.”

  At that point her expression changed. She was losing her patience but had to hear me out. She couldn’t afford my standing up and taking another vacation. Maybe a longer one.

  She needed a break to simmer down, and when a waiter passed by, she seized the chance to order. She settled on a salad and beer. I on the other hand was hungry and opted for pork ribs and potatoes with sour cream. Our drinks arrived immediately, and Angela ignored me when I gestured to toast glasses.

  “Honestly I don’t understand why, at a moment as delicate as this, we have to return to arguing about trivial details like the trial.”

  “Because you still don’t get that you’ll have to do it without me.”

  “We need a witness who can draw the connection between Paz Anaya Vega and the accused—Buratti, Rossini, Max the Memory, and Campagna,” she insisted, “and make them accessories to the murder of your wife and girlfriend and drug trafficking. At the opportune time they’ll be caught in possession of three kilos of cocaine.”

  “I can do you one better,” I snapped. “I can attest to having seen that relic Rossini shoot to kill. I can nail the cop who covered it all up. I’d be more than happy to repay those dicks the favor after they forced me out of Padua. But I’ll only show up in court footloose and with immunity in my pocket.”

  “I want to be honest,” said Marino. “At the moment I can’t guarantee anything. To give you what you’re asking I need time to get various people to come to an agreement. I can promise you, however, that I will do everything possible if you’ll go back to being operative.”

  “How can I refuse in the face of such honesty?” I replied sarcastically.

  “Now’s the time to button things up with Balakian,” she went on. “Buratti and his partners have found out that Paz Anaya Vega is back in Vienna and has put her hunt on pause for the time being, because someone else is hard up for the little queen’s drug-trafficking throne.”

  Bravo, tres amigos. Swept up by their moral outrage to exact justice for Gemma and Martina, they had finally found the Spaniard. Three dipshits from the provinces, willingly walking into court to be slaughtered by yours truly.

  “When are you planning on putting them back behind bars?”

  “What I hear from Inspector Campagna, they should be in Padua in a few days. We’ll give them time to be seen around town, then narcotics will be tipped off.”

  I wondered if Buratti and his partners were all that stupid.

  “It doesn’t strike you as being a little too easy?”

  Angela Marino held out her arms. “So what if it is? What chance do they stand against the law, which has finally decided to give them their just deserts? Their fate is sealed no matter what.”

  I enjoyed baiting her.

  “When all’s said and done, I deserve a long sentence too.”

  “You’re different, Giorgio,” she replied with suspicious alacrity, as if she’d been waiting for the chance to rub my nose in the harsh truth. “You’re an almost perfect criminal machine. Your whole life you’ve had the wisdom to align yourself with those in a position of greater power, and that makes you useful to us. You have been in the past, you are now, and you always will be.”

  I saw what she was driving at.

  “I’m particularly adept at doing the dirty work.”

  Angela Marino nodded, gauging my reaction. But I didn’t take offense that easy. Instead I was sorry I couldn’t show her, not then and not ever, that serving the powers that be gave me the chance to create an empire all my own, where I was free to be me and could get my needs met. All the more so since I have always had a great gift: knowing how to content myself.

  “Buratti and his friends are more of a threat than you,” the cop continued. “They assume the right to defy the state in the name of storybook principles. In this big arena, they always take the side of the bull. They’re useless has-beens and have to be eliminated because they’re unshakeable. Or so they think. I’m going to have fun pitting them against one anoth
er and watching them jockey to take the stand.”

  I began to seriously question whether Marino was not a little disturbed. If that was her idea of fun, there was nothing to be happy about.

  “Tell me about the operation,” I asked, picking a rib clean. The ribs at La Nena were light years better.

  “First I have to bring you up to speed,” she answered, a strange flicker in her eyes. “We gave some thought to that business with your phone call, when you convinced Balakian’s men that you were in a relationship with a woman.”

  “They came this close to catching me,” I remarked.

  “Well, that woman’s in Munich now and won’t leave your side again.”

  “Is that right?” I teased. “And who is she?”

  “It’s me, dear,” she gushed. “I’ll be spending every waking moment with you, and if you try to pull another stunt, I’ll kill you.”

  Cheap shot. This would complicate everything.

  “You’re not up to it,” I objected. “You’ve got cop written all over you. These guys are professionals, and someone like you, who’s always hid behind the safety of her uniform and rank, two bites and they’ll devour you. Let me handle the dirty work. I’ll be just fine on my own.”

  She angrily speared a slice of pepper. “Shut your hole,” she hissed. “No one asked for your opinion and no one wants to hear it.”

  “Then explain this: why have I been here in plain view to build trust with this crew just to start all over again from scratch?”

  “Because it’s easier if two of us bring an end to this operation. We believe they’re more likely to trust a couple. Besides, it gives us an opportunity to justify your disappearance.”

  “I ran to come get you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you have an identity that’ll pass inspection?”

  “Made in record time after that woman listened in on our sweet talk.”

  “Will it stand scrutiny?”

  “They’ve already stuck their noses in it. Our experts have picked up their digital footprint. They know the woman you love is called Daniela Sileo.” She stood up. “We’re going home,” she ordered.