But in order to run away, and all that other good stuff, they needed money. And he didn’t have any. Moreover, the little savings Edith had couldn’t be used because they were tied up in stocks and bonds by a broker connected to the organization.
They had one shot at realizing their dream: rob the madam.
The guy knew that all the cash that the girls earned and the pimps collected was kept in a safe in Frau Vieira’s office. Three times a month an accountant would pick up the money, but during the Christmas season all the earnings from December weren’t touched until after the Epiphany.
A hefty sum, as Edith knew. She’d been fucked by the crew’s deputies for so long that she knew all the details. Even where they hid the key to deposit the money during the day. The madam kept the other key around her neck.
It was a practical system, though hardly secure. But no one would dare try to pull off a job like that. The Portuguese, especially Luis Azevedo and Rui Salgueiro, had earned Frau Vieira the respect she commanded, breaking bones and creating the myth that they could make anyone with the gall to challenge her disappear.
It was up to Edith to decide. He didn’t pressure her. He didn’t need to. Happiness was within her reach and she knew that, for a whore who wants to change her lot, some opportunities only present themselves once in a lifetime.
On the night of December 31, while the world was ringing in the New Year, Edith slipped out of the broom closet where she’d hid all afternoon. She had gone to the office with some excuse. After exchanging a few words with Frau Vieira and one of her exes, she pretended to leave and then crept into that closet full of mops and buckets.
The key was in its usual place and, as fireworks illuminated Vienna’s skyline, she opened the safe and stuffed the bills into her purse. The john was waiting for her in a car with their suitcases.
They entered the highway, having carefully planned their route. They’d cross Germany into France. He stopped at a gas station to fill up the car and asked her to go buy him cigarettes. By the time she got back, carrying two packs of Marlboro Reds and the violet mints she liked so much, he wasn’t there. He’d left her.
Klaudia couldn’t say what they did to her when she came back to Vienna. Rumors spread. The most credible was that she’d been locked in a basement, and after a few days her lover was brought in to keep her company. A corpse. His body pummeled.
Word had it that before he died the man had confessed to colluding with one of the pimps in the crew. In fact, one of them had vanished all of a sudden and hadn’t been seen since. Apparently the plan had been his handiwork. They’d picked Edith because they figured she was the “right one,” sensitive enough to fall for the oldest trick in the book: love.
Frau Vieira proved sympathetic. Edith could go on living as long as she paid back the money she’d stolen. Plus interest. The madam told the other girls that Edith would be her old whore forever. Forced her to become an outrageous character, verging on the ridiculous. Frau Vieira’s henchmen made sure the johns didn’t get too intimate. She condemned her to solitude.
“Her life’s hell,” said Klaudia, finishing her story. “We’re all convinced that she’ll go mad or take her own life.”
Now I understood Edith’s reaction when I’d mentioned her jailer. I looked at my partners. They both nodded: we’d go forward with our plan.
“We want to talk to her,” I said. “Can you tell us where she lives? Or maybe you know another way of contacting her without putting her in danger?”
The girl looked perplexed. “I guess I didn’t make myself clear. Frau Vieira won’t ever let her go, she’d lose her reputation,” she repeated. “And this time, the girl would die and you’d disappear in some ditch.”
No one batted an eye. Klaudia looked us over, one at a time. “I don’t get it. You should be afraid. Maybe you don’t believe what I’m saying?”
“We believe everything you told us,” the Fat Man assured her, digging into an extra-large portion of paprika-glazed ribs. “The fact is, we think trying to help Edith is worth it.”
She pointed at me. “Just because your friend here likes her?” she asked, in shock. “He’s only seen her a couple of times.” Then she turned to me. “You haven’t even slept with her. What happens if you don’t like her? Your story doesn’t add up.”
Klaudia was losing her patience. It was understandable. It wasn’t easy to explain the meaning of an outlaw heart. Or that it was impossible for me to accept the idea that I couldn’t court a woman just because she was the old property of a ruthless Portuguese madam.
Old Rossini saw to it.
“All we want is what’s good for her. If that means forgetting having ever met her, that’s what we’ll do. But if there’s a concrete, sufficiently safe chance of tearing her away from Frau Vieira, we’re going to take it. And we’re not going to ditch her at a gas station. We’ll do everything we can to guarantee she has a future.”
He placed his hand on my arm. “As for my friend, you should know that this is how he’s fallen in love his whole life. He meets a woman he likes and loses his head. But there’s nothing wrong with that either.”
Klaudia smiled. She was still far from understanding our reasons but figured she could trust us.
“You guys are insane.”
Max grabbed the handle of his stein. “To love, liberty, and insanity.”
* * *
Edith lived in Lorystraße, on the first floor of a small apartment building with a sky-blue façade, down the way from a small park. Klaudia gave us the scoop about her shift: she started work in the early afternoon and left her last john at night. She’d also offered to talk to Edith about our meeting and put her at ease, but we refused, because that might put her in danger.
We’d improvise. The one spot that allowed us to surveil the door to her building was a vegetarian restaurant, which served us an excellent mid-morning snack of potato beer scones. The problem was they served non-alcoholic drinks only.
After exactly one hour of waiting, I proposed to go ring the bell. Maybe she’d let me in.
“She won’t,” wagered the Fat Man.
“She’s still asleep,” said Beniamino, raising the stakes.
“But if she goes out and we approach her on the street, she might freak and start screaming,” I objected. “The last thing we need is to be stopped by police.”
Fifteen minutes later Edith solved our problem for us when she stepped out of the building. She had on the same overcoat that she wore the day we met at Jonas Reindl Coffee. Only this time she had her hair down. She was beautiful.
I stood up. “I’m going to talk to her,” I said, moved.
“No,” Rossini countered firmly. “I’ll go.”
“But I know her,” I protested.
“And she knows you,” replied Max. “It’d be better if we played the kind and charming stranger card.”
I watched Beniamino jog up to her and strike up a conversation. At a certain point my friend pointed to the restaurant and added a few words before she backed off, practically ran away. Our effort had gone up in flames.
“Things’ll go better next time,” said the Fat Man to console me.
The Old Gangster returned to our table, looking, all in all, pretty satisfied. “I told her I’m your friend, that you’re not a prick, and that if she wants to meet us she can find us at this restaurant.”
“Doesn’t look like it worked,” I said, discouraged.
“She’s a woman who’s been through terrible experiences, who’s living in terror now,” replied Rossini. “She needs time to think and figure out that she can trust you.”
“Beniamino’s right,” Max weighed in. “Giving her the chance to decide was a smart move.”
I looked at the street. Edith wasn’t coming back. “O.K. We’ll wait and hope,” I conceded, something polemical in my tone.
The waitress came over. Twenty-something, her red hair parted in two messy braids, on her left wrist a tattoo of a community center in Berlin. “We’re about to start serving lunch,” she announced, as if she harbored doubts about our sense of time. “Are you going to free the table or should I bring you a menu?”
“We’ll eat here,” I hastened to say, casting a cool look at Max. You never knew with him where food was concerned.
“I’ve got nothing against vegetarianism,” he said testily while perusing the day’s specialties. “In fact, I agree that the consumption of meat is excessive, and that a diet light on—not deprived of—animal protein can be beneficial—”
“Quit while you’re ahead,” said Beniamino with a smirk. “You’re not fooling anybody.”
To spite us the Fat Man ordered vegan. I let myself be enticed by the barley soup.
At some point I looked up from my dish and saw Edith staring at me through the window. With a conspicuous wave of his hand and a broad smile, Old Rossini invited her in. But she retreated again.
“She’ll be back,” bet Beniamino.
He was right. Five minutes later she was sitting at our table.
“What do you want?” she asked, her voice trembling. “If Frau Vieira didn’t send you then how do you know where I live?”
“So many questions!” cried Rossini jovially. “Why don’t you have a bite to eat while we explain everything?”
She shook her head. She was too nervous. We were frightening her.
“We know what happened to you,” I said. “We’re not mixed up with Frau Vieira or Luis Azevedo or Rui Salgueiro. If you want, we can help you build a life somewhere else, where no one will think they have the right to decide what you do with your body.”
“Why do you want to do that for me? I’m just Frau Vieira’s old whore.”
“To us you’re Edith Amaral,” I shot back.
“So? What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
We could have bandied about big meaningful words, appealed to the ideals of humanity. She would have laughed in our faces. Hookers are the kind of people who feel cheated on principle. Edith most of all.
“My woman used to work strip clubs. Her name was Sylvie,” Beniamino began. “She was a burlesque queen. Hated pimps. More than once, with my support, she helped girls get out from under their exploiters. Then I had to kill a man, and in retaliation she was kidnapped and surrendered to a crew that rented out women for certain kinds of parties. She was forced to dance, and afterward they’d gang bang her. We managed to free her, and I killed everyone who’d done her harm. But Sylvie couldn’t forget the violence she’d suffered. My love wasn’t enough, and in the end she killed herself.”
The Old Gangster’s eyes were full of tears. He reached his hand out to Edith. “I can’t sleep at night knowing there are people out there like Frau Vieira. When they cross my path, I don’t duck them. You’re the old whore I want to rescue from her.”
Edith sighed and shut her eyes. She knew the man in front of her was telling the truth, but she still wasn’t ready to risk it. “There’s no way of escaping the Frau. She’ll kill us.”
Rossini gripped her hand hard and forced her to look at him. “They’re the ones that need to watch their backs.”
She smiled bitterly before standing up.
“I don’t know what to think,” she confessed. “It’s all so absurd.”
“Where do you want to go?” I asked. “Do you want to go back to Portugal?”
“There’s no one there for me anymore. I’m dead to my family.”
“Where then?”
“I don’t know. I’ve lived in Austria all my life.”
“I could take you around the world. That way you could choose a place that you liked.”
Another smile. More bitter than the one before. “I’ve got to go.”
I followed her. “I’d like to see you again,” I said as she headed home.
“Who? Edith or Tempest Storm?”
“As a pin-up you’re a knockout, but I prefer this you.”
“Then it won’t happen. Frau Vieira won’t allow me to see anybody outside work.”
“I don’t want to pay to sleep with you. I’d like the chance to see you again.”
She pointed to a bar a few hundred feet away. “Tomorrow morning at ten. O.K.?”
“I’ll be there,” I cried, happy as a boy. She shook her head good-naturedly.
I could have kissed her on the cheek, but after hesitating a minute I turned and walked back.
My friends had left the place and were enjoying their first cigarette in several hours. The restaurant was one of the few to have banned smoking.
Rossini still had tears in his eyes. It takes a long time to recover from pain of that magnitude.
“Thanks,” I said softly.
“For what?”
“For finding a way to speak on Edith’s level. I know what it cost you.”
He changed the subject. Just as I expected he would.
“It’s useless to continue to torment her,” he said. “She’s too scared to make decisions that important. It’s clear she wants to be rid of the scumbags draining her life, but she won’t do anything to save herself.”
I drew a cigarette out of the Fat Man’s pack. “It’s up to us. As long as we figure out a way not to get killed.”
“We have two options,” the Old Gangster chimed in. “The first is we steal her from under their nose. There’s always that convent in Croatia where the nuns took care of the girls Sylvie and I used to bring them.”
“And the second?” implored the Fat Man.
“We do things the right way,” replied Beniamino with a malicious smile. “We go see Frau Vieira and plead our friend’s case. The madam tells us to fuck off, we take offense, and we make it clear to her she’s in the wrong.”
“Gut reaction, I prefer the first scenario,” I said. “In our situation, we’re better off not drawing the local cops’ attention. According to Martinenghi, they have a good relationship with the Portuguese madam and her crew.”
“Speaking of, did you ever hear back from Campagna?” asked Max.
“I switched off the phone,” I admitted. “I don’t feel like listening to his bullshit while we’re tied up with other business.”
“Well, you should be in constant contact with him, Marco,” lectured Rossini. “We need to keep an eye on what Dottoressa Marino is up to.”
“I’ll take care of it tomorrow morning, after I’ve had breakfast with Edith.”
“You managed to score another date,” complimented the Fat Man.
But Rossini advised me, with venom in his voice, “Try not to make her run away like last time.”
He was pissed that I hadn’t been monitoring the business with Paz Anaya Vega that had brought us to Vienna in the first place. I should have apologized and called the inspector, and instead I was failing to appreciate our situation because I was caught up worrying about Edith’s fate. And my love life. I knew that, but right then all I wanted was to listen to my heart as it pounded out a twelve-bar blues. It was a bad idea but, you know, sometimes common sense fucks off elsewhere.
With the other phone I called Pierino Martinenghi.
“We need to see you.”
“Then you can buy me a drink. I get off before dinner.”
We met the safecracker at a wine bar in Singerstaße. Pierino had had time to change; he wasn’t sporting that ugly hotel uniform anymore.
“What are we drinking?” asked Max, scoping out the bottles on display.
“I’ll start with a bottle of Silvio Nardi ‘43’: Sangiovese, Merlot, and Petit Verdot. Then I’ll take a Brunello di Montalcino, the Manachiara, from the same estate.”
“You want to spoil us,” I joked.
“To be honest I want to pamper m
yself while I wait to hear what kind of jam you’re planning to put me in,” admitted Pierino with a sly smirk. “Yesterday you had dinner with Klaudia and, lo and behold, today you’re dying to talk to me. I mean, first it’s drug dealers, then it’s Frau Vieira—you don’t want to miss out on any of the action in Vienna.”
Beniamino held his hands out. As he should have.
“If you don’t want to touch the subject we can drink to each other’s health and go back to being friends like before.”
Martinenghi frowned. “Thanks for the courtesy, but I want to hear what you have to say, then I’ll decide what to do,” he explained calmly. “For the record, I hate pimps too. Working in hotels, I’ve been forced to witness scenes that have left a mark right here,” he added, touching his chest at the height of his heart.
“I’m glad we’re of the same mind, though I didn’t have any doubts to the contrary,” continued Rossini. “We’ve decided to draw Edith from the deck.”
“So where’s the problem?” asked Pierino.
“If she disappears, the other girls will think it was the work of their protectors, done to punish her,” I answered. “We want to avoid consolidating their power.”
The safecracker stuck his nose in his glass and breathed in the wine’s bouquet. “I get it. You want to save Edith and at the same time damage the crew’s rep.”
“Damage of a certain scale,” I stressed. “All of Vienna needs to know. It’s got to be the biggest story of the year.”
“Frau Vieira will involve the cops. She’s got several on her payroll.”
“We don’t plan on sticking around long.”
Martinenghi picked up a slice of prosciutto and began coiling it around a breadstick with painfully slow precision. He needed time to think. He knew that helping us put him in a thorny position. If not a dangerous one.
“I’m planning a score,” he confided, a spark of excitement in his eyes. “A beautiful safe from the 1970s, all gears and levers, none of that electronic crap. I’ve already cracked two of the same model, but this young widow was modified twenty years after. It’s a challenge I can’t give up—and won’t.”
Blues for Outlaw Hearts and Old Whores Page 14