Blues for Outlaw Hearts and Old Whores

by Massimo Carlotto

  “We’ll keep our word,” stammered the inspector, white as a sheet. He hadn’t planned on being mixed up in so much killing.

  “It gets done immediately,” I said. “The cop should be back in Italy tomorrow morning at the latest.”

  “Not possible,” objected the drug dealer. “This needs to be done the right way.”

  “Bullshit,” I snapped. “The truth is you’re not in control of the situation.”

  I took Campagna by the arm. “Let’s go.”

  Abo gently placed his big mitt on my chest. “Wait, let me think about it.”

  “There’s no time for that.”

  “Paz is with the hostages,” he explained. “She won’t leave them for a minute. There are three men with her. Only one is on my side.”

  “And you and a couple of your men can’t pay her a visit?”

  “The Spaniard’s as cunning as the devil, she’d figure something was up. She thinks I’m in the city attending to business while I wait to hear from the Italian cops.”

  “Well then, your errand boy is going to have to take care of it. Can he handle that?”

  “Yeah, he’s one of the best, but I need to find a way to tell him over the phone.”

  I raised my arms. “Maybe now’s your chance, don’t you think?”

  Tscherne walked off to make the call.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” faltered Campagna, sliding into a panic. “No one authorized you to negotiate those terms. Get the address off him and we’ll send in the Austrian SWAT team.”

  “You’re not on about getting the local police involved again, are you? The Spaniard must die and the plan followed to the letter,” I explained flatly. “Otherwise it all goes awry and we end up in deep shit.”

  “You talk about killing people like it were no big deal.”

  “There’s no solution that allows for respecting the most basic principles of your ‘legality,’” I reiterated. “But that was clear from the moment someone permitted Angela Marino to launch her operation.”

  I pulled out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and helped him light it. “Besides,” I added, “there were three people in the cellar at La Nena: Paz Anaya Vega, Abo, and someone else we haven’t identified. The Spaniard will be the only one to pay for the murder of Martina and Gemma, but at least the poor girls will get some justice. And the death of Pellegrini will also be welcome.”

  The cop turned his back on me and took a few drags. Who knows what he was looking at or thinking? It would have been even more complicated had I explained to him that I’d given Tscherne enough rope to hang himself with. Tscherne felt safe, Pellegrini’s death meant there were no witnesses left to nail him, and rather than disband the organization he’d consolidate it to conquer new shares of the market. That was the error that would spell his ruin: he didn’t have what it took to keep afloat in the choppy waters of international drug trafficking. Campagna was light years away from that kind of criminal thinking.

  Tscherne returned moments later. “My man says he’ll do it during dinner,” he said. “We’ll post up a few hundred feet away. If all goes smoothly, we’ll receive a call and go collect the hostage. Otherwise we’ll have to finish the job ourselves.”

  “‘We’ who?” asked Campagna.

  The drug dealer sighed. “I can’t mobilize other members of the organization, obviously.”

  “This plan only works if it’s kept under wraps,” I stepped in, addressing Campagna. “Should something come up, there’ll be three of you to intervene: you, Abo, and Rossini. Max and I will be there, but we’re no use in a gunfight.”

  “Conscientious objectors?” mocked Tscherne.

  “Something like that,” I replied.

  It was at that moment Giulio Campagna tried to torch the whole plan. “You’re out of your minds,” he began in pure Paduan dialect. “I’m not shooting anybody—in a foreign country no less—without a sliver of authorization or legal cover.”

  Luckily Abo couldn’t understand a word. I talked the inspector down in dialect: “Quit making a scene. No one’s asking you to be a gunslinger,” I lied. “But if you keep this bullshit up, there’s no way you’re going home with Marino alive.”

  Abo eyed me suspiciously. “What the fuck are you on about?”

  “Nothing important,” I said curtly and switched the subject. “Now we have to decide where and when to meet.”

  A few minutes before 5 P.M. we arrived in the center of the village of Großebersdorf, followed by the car that Campagna had rented, which would convey Dottoressa Marino to the closest border, where she would be picked up by functionaries from the ministry. We were in the Superb. Me at the wheel, Beniamino riding next to me with his handguns in his coat pockets and extra magazines in his jacket, and Max navigating from the backseat, checking the route on his tablet.

  I hankered to drink and smoke. And be with Edith.

  “Killing your own partners while sitting at the same table, eating the same bread, is an atrocity only drug dealers could commit,” said Old Rossini, disgusted, while I parked next to a fire station as per Tscherne’s instructions.

  “If Abo’s man changes his mind, it’s up to you to settle the account,” I responded.

  “I almost wouldn’t mind. At that point we could tweak the finale.”

  “Take out Abo?” asked the Fat Man.

  “Why not? The problem is I’m alone and outgunned.”

  “You can’t count on the cop,” I said.

  Rossini moved his wrist, causing his bracelets to jingle.

  “Here he comes.”

  Campagna opened the door and climbed in next to Max.

  “I miss something?” he asked.

  Beniamino turned and handed him a gun and a magazine.

  “Do these duds still fire?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Rossini replied grimly to shut him up. It didn’t work.

  “This is all wrong,” mumbled Campagna. “There’s not a single thing right about this business.”

  None of us said anything back. Words no longer mattered. The time had come to act and pray that we’d get lucky. We smoked in silence, in the dark and cold. We didn’t even have a clear idea where we were.

  A little later Abo showed up in an off-road vehicle. Beniamino got out of the car to check that he was alone. With scum like that you can never be sure. Knowing my friend, I could tell he was looking for any “legitimate” opening to kill the drug dealer. He couldn’t stand the thought that Tscherne might walk away from the murders of Martina and Gemma. Especially after the sexual assault they’d had to endure.

  Tscherne started driving, and we followed. Our tiny, three-car convoy began to pass through towns, gradually ascending the hillsides buried under snow. Occasionally the headlights illuminated a sign for a winery. The entire area looked abandoned, but the countryside was merely following the rhythm of the seasons, and its inhabitants remained snug inside their homes in anticipation of the new day.

  Abo turned onto a dirt road and stopped after a few hundred feet. He motioned for us to get out. This was the place where we were supposed to wait for the killer’s call.

  “The house is about three hundred yards away,” he explained, “but we can’t get any closer right now.”

  I checked the time on my cellphone: 6:12. They’d be sitting down for dinner soon. It was so cold out that I hoped Tscherne’s man wouldn’t wait till dessert to leap into action.

  I realized that it would take time—how much I couldn’t say—to recover from the downturn that my life had taken. And my friends’ lives. Waiting in the dark for a drug dealer to kill his accomplices wasn’t how I’d wanted things to go down. Despite all the reasons I could marshal to justify our being on that hill, I felt deeply dismayed at how cynical this business had made me.

  In a matter of minutes human beings wo
uld be dead, thanks to a strategy that I had devised, patiently, and for irreproachable reasons. But it was the hard-heartedness with which I was confronting this epilogue that gave me pause.

  And now that the floodgates of truth had opened, it wasn’t hard to see that my infatuation with Edith was nothing more than the antidote to keep the poison, which was turning me into a different and lesser man, from reaching my heart. That outlaw heart, which enabled me to meet life with my head held high.

  27 minutes later Abo’s phone rang. “It’s done,” he said, and walked over to his off-road vehicle.

  Our headlights illuminated the façade of an old farmhouse. A man stood in the doorway gripping a gun.

  “Careful now,” Rossini advised Campagna, dropping a round in the chamber.

  Tscherne signaled to follow him inside. At the doorstep I traded glances with the guy who had done the dirty work: his eyes were cold and glassy as a reptile’s.

  The kitchen was infused with the smell of food and the stink of gunpowder. On the floor the bodies of two men shot in the head. Only Paz Anaya Vega was still sitting, wedged between a chair and the table. She’d taken two bullets square in the chest. In her right hand she still held the spoon she had been eating her soup with.

  “Where’s Marino?” asked the inspector.

  “In this room,” answered the drug dealer. His man fished a key from his pocket and quickly opened an old, solid wood door.

  The woman had heard the shots and hadn’t known what to expect. When she recognized Campagna, she let out a sigh of relief and collapsed on the bed. He ran over to make sure she was all right.

  “We saved your ass, Dottoressa,” I said loudly. “You’re in our debt now.”

  She stared at me a moment, then lowered her eyes while Max took the opportunity to snap a few photos with his phone.

  “Did you shoot Pellegrini too?” I asked the killer in English.

  “No,” the man answered, pointing to another room.

  Old Rossini, gun in hand, motioned for him to hurry up and open it. When Handsome Giorgio saw us, he was more surprised than Marino but quicker to take stock of the situation.

  “It was you who screwed me over, right? I can’t believe three idiots managed to fuck everything up,” he began blathering, shifting like a condemned man in his rocking chair, which wouldn’t stop moving up and down.

  “Shoot this piece of shit,” I told Beniamino.

  “I don’t shoot men who are tied up.”

  It was the second time that Rossini had the chance to eliminate Giorgio Pellegrini and, for one reason or another, refused to pull the trigger.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  He took the gun by the barrel and held it out to me.

  “You do it. Or ask Abo and his little pal to do you the favor. There are some things I won’t do, and I’m amazed that you’re surprised.”

  Our interlude amused Pellegrini.

  “You guys are a couple of standup comedians.”

  “Well then?” goaded Rossini.

  “You know I don’t use guns,” I said, forced to reiterate my position.

  “Exactly. So don’t try to decide for others.”

  Caught up arguing, we didn’t realize that Marino had come up behind us. She darted forward, snatched the gun, aimed, and fired. Three shots in quick succession, but only one hit Giorgio Pellegrini, just above his stomach; the other two were lodged in the wall over his shoulder. The cop let the weapon fall to the floor and ran over to him.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed in his face. “Fuck you!”

  Campagna grabbed her by the shoulders and began shaking her like a dummy. “What the hell did you do?” he screamed. “What the hell did you do?”

  Marino burst into tears. She was very different from the woman we’d known before. This business had changed her too—had managed to break her.

  “Make sure she resigns,” urged Rossini, still incredulous, picking up the shells off the floor as a precaution.

  “You’ll see, the higher ups will jump at the opportunity to be rid of this basket case,” replied the inspector.

  I blocked him from moving. “See how easy it is?” I prodded. “Welcome to the real world.”

  “I’m done with this crap.”

  I laughed in his face. “Starting today your bosses will use you whenever they need someone who knows a shortcut or two. Once you set foot in this racket, you never get out.”

  The inspector shook his head before brusquely leading Marino out of the house. A moment later we heard the sound of the car driving away.

  Pellegrini wheezed to the rhythm of the rocking chair. He must have been in a lot of pain. I turned to Abo. “You’ll take care of this?”

  Tscherne nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle everything.”

  At dawn we were still awake, drinking and smoking in the living room of the hideout on Oswaldgasse, trying to flush out the right words, which had until then remained hidden in the dark.

  “For the first time in my life I was forced to team up with cops and drug dealers,” began Old Rossini, hoarse from fatigue and tension. “I’m well aware that we had no other choice and that we’d already resigned ourselves to ‘go for broke,’ but I want to be clear—”

  “It won’t happen again,” Max preempted him, “that goes for me too. Over the last few years we’ve been sucked into a vortex of cases where the line between our principles and everything we can’t abide has become thin, sometimes nonexistent.”

  It was my turn to say something. “The truth is that the world around us has changed. For the worse. And it’s harder and harder to survive without stooping to make comprises.”

  “I agree,” answered the Fat Man. “But maybe the time has come to admit our weakness and fragility. We need to catch our breath and think calmly about our future.”

  “We need money,” Beniamino broke in. He didn’t care for conversations that took a low-key or excessively intimate turn. “After we’ve brought Edith to safety, I’m going to find Luc and Christine. Appears they intend to clean out a jewelry shop around Tolone.”

  Luc and Christine were a couple of professional thieves, close friends of the Old Gangster. They adored him.

  “I’m going to the mountains,” announced Max. “A dear friend of mine wrote to say she wants to see me again.”

  For my part, I didn’t have any plans. I had Edith. If she wanted, I’d follow her anywhere. Otherwise I’d return to Padua. The lawyers I knew there sent trivial cases my way, enough to make a living. Paid in cash fresh from the ATM in a parking lot or café.

  I stood up and grabbed the bottle of Calvados. “This round of goodbyes is making me sad,” I said before retreating to my room.

  Sena Ehrhardt sang “Cry to Me.” After that I sought refuge in the arms of Mary Gauthier. She knew what was what. “Walk Through the Fire” was just the blues to give meaning to the sadness weighing me down.

  NINE

  Vienna was strange, shrouded in fog. Not as thick as the fog clouding my head. I rang Edith’s buzzer at ten sharp. Five minutes later I began to suspect she wouldn’t let me in. As I lit a cigarette I saw a man climb out of a parked car and walk toward me. He didn’t look threatening; in fact, he appeared glad to see me. He must have been a little over 65: thinning dyed-black hair, a puckered face, patent leather shoes, and gold rings on his fingers. A pimp.

  “Paisà” he greeted me. It was the one word of Italian he knew; after that, he muddled his way through a mix of English and Spanish. “Thank God you arrived. I would have frozen to death waiting in the car.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Nuno. And you must be Marco, Edith’s Italian friend, correct?”

  I smelled trouble underneath the guy’s cheerful facade.

  “What do you want, Nuno?”

  “Frau Vieira is
very fond of Edith,” he said, “and would like to know why you’re so interested in her.”

  I pointed to the building. “Where is she?”

  He smiled ambiguously. “Staying at the Frau’s.”

  Things weren’t supposed to go down this way.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “You know how whores get,” he replied, doing the wise old man bit. “They talk. Dear Edith thought she could spill her story to an old friend who works as a coat-check at a bar; instead her friend turned around and reported it to Frau Vieira.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About an Italian who wanted to help her change her life, take her abroad, you know, the usual rubbish that comes out of a whore’s mouth.”

  “You’d know.”

  “Oh, I know,” he replied. “Same as I know about men who string them along. They act like Prince Charming then ruin them, because they’re egomaniacs and don’t get what whores really need.”

  Listen to this piece of shit. I felt like knocking him in the face, but now wasn’t the time. “I’d love to delve deeper into this philosophical side of sexual exploitation,” I bit back, “but I don’t think you tracked me down just to chat.”

  He changed tack. “Frau Vieira would appreciate a face-to-face.”

  “When and where?”

  He reached into his pocket for his phone and walked away to talk in private. Useless precaution: I didn’t understand a word of German. Nor Portuguese, the language Nuno used to communicate.

  “In an hour the Frau will be at a fashion house on Prinz Eugen-Straße, where there’s a nice sitting room with coffee and cookies.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  After confirming the appointment, the man put away his phone and looked at me. “I was sure you’d accept. You never know when to give up.”

  “You said it yourself,” I scoffed, “you’re a real connoisseur of the human spirit.”

  “And that’s precisely why I suggest you listen to Frau Vieira. She’s a very understanding woman.”

  He turned heel and headed to his car. As he pulled away he made a lighthearted wave that I didn’t know how to read. But I wasn’t going to waste time thinking about it. I called Rossini and broke the news to him.