Or, if you’re not that lucky, a five-thousand-lira streetwalker on the Via Paullese.
The stabbing pains in my groin and the intermittent shivering both continue. And now I have bouts of nausea to keep them company. I emerge from the trees into what I would call open countryside, if it weren’t for the fact that on the horizon the bastions of yet another industrial plant loom over a field of amber wheat. Maybe this is the kind of dystopian postindustrial place where the Old Man and the Little Boy from the Francesco Guccini song will stroll together one day.
I pull up to an isolated farmhouse that has seen better days and that still, all these years later, carries a whiff of the postwar era. The appearance of the farmhouse is one of general decrepitude; the courtyard looks more like a junkman’s warehouse than part of a working Italian farm. A rusted-out refrigerator is leaning against a tree; the gutted carcass of an automobile stripped of license plates and tires is perched forlornly on four stacks of bricks. A roll-down shutter is jammed to one side so that the window looks like the half-lidded eye of a dog. In the background I catch a glimpse of a low building made of panels of rusted sheet metal nailed to wooden poles driven into the soil.
Weeds sprout up here and there, sowing their intermittent chaos at random, and one side of the house can be reached only by wading through a full-fledged plantation of stinging nettles. Numbers and letters daubed inexpertly with a paintbrush and black paint on one of the two pillars flanking the little entry drive inform me that I’ve reached my destination.
I stop the Mini in the courtyard. Maybe it would have been smarter to drive on, park some distance away, and walk back to the house quietly. But I’m in too much pain and in too much of a hurry.
The door in the front of the house is fastened by a padlock on a chain that runs through two holes drilled through the wood of both panels. On the ground floor, all the wooden blinds are rolled down completely. I skirt the house and reach the back. A walkway of shattered, crumbling concrete runs the entire length of the building. Through the door of the shed in the back, left half open and concealed from the road, I can see the orange tail of Daytona’s Porsche. I proceed up the sidewalk, past windows protected by metal grates, and come to a halt before a wooden door.
The door is ajar.
I shove the door, instinctively apprehensive of the squeak that might follow.
What an idiot I am.
My arrival has been amply announced by the sound of my Mini pulling into the courtyard. I step inside and glance around at the dark, filthy room, to all appearances completely uninhabited. I take a quick look around the ground floor. Nothing but bare, empty rooms, crumpled paper on the floor, a dusty blanket, a stack of chipped dishes in what seems to be a kitchen. Everywhere, the dank smell of dust and saltpeter. I wonder to myself who could live in such a pigsty. And yet someone must, since someone pays the electric and phone bills.
I start up the stairway that runs from the landing just inside the front door and climbs back up to the second floor, a typical architectural feature of these country houses. When I get to the top of the stairs, I find myself in a slightly better kept part of the house, where signs of cleaning and tidiness point to a human presence. A hallway runs the whole length of the house, with the open doors of the bedrooms looking out along the wall like so many gaping mouths.
It looks as if the area to the right has been pretty much neglected, and so I turn left. I go past a room with two cots with bare mattresses on them. A closed door with a pane of frosted glass might be a bathroom. Then there’s another room with a half-open door, through which I can make out a double bed with rumpled sheets.
Finally I step through a door and into the last room on this side of the building.
A quick glance around the room gives me a clear idea of the place. The paint on the walls had been applied in broad, messy stripes with a paint roller; there are some swaybacked armchairs, newspapers and glasses on a small round table, canned food on a shelf, dirty dishes in a bucket, a gas hot plate connected to a propane tank, a telephone attached to the wall.
While I was walking upstairs, I wondered why no one came to see who was in the house.
Now that I’m here, I can see the reason.
Daytona is stretched out on the floor, on one side, his head lolling on his extended arm. The whole front of his shirt is soaked red with blood. As a result of the fall, the comb-over that he so zealously kept in place has split in half. One part is draped lankly over his rolled-up sleeve, while the other sags over his ear, baring the bald spot that he worked tirelessly to conceal. Hearing my footsteps, he moves his eyes without turning his head. When he recognizes me, his alarmed glance relaxes slightly, replaced by a look of relief.
“B … avo.”
His voice is faint and weak, and in fact I guessed more than heard him utter my name. I kneel down beside him. His breathing is labored, with a hissing rattle that seems to be coming from somewhere other than this room.
He’s crying, and I don’t know if it’s from pain or distress. A sob turns into a spurt of reddish foam emerging from between his lips to greet the world. From the corner of his mouth it slithers to the floor, where it turns into a red tear of disappointment.
“Fr … gv … me.”
Forgiveness does not belong to this world. But I have the pretty strong impression that soon neither will he, so I don’t think twice about giving him what he wants.
“Of course I forgive you, you ugly idiot.”
As if prompted by his weeping, tears well up in my eyes too: I cry for him, for myself, for all the idiots just like us, for the whole world that an imperfect god has relegated to the space outside these windows with their filthy glass panes. For all those who made us the way we are, and for us, who allowed them to do it. For this pain that twists my guts, which must not be all that different from what Daytona is feeling.
“What happened?”
“Stabbed … in … chest.”
Each word seems to cost him an infinite effort. He’s at the end of the line, and he knows it. He’s counting his breaths, waiting to draw the last one, the breath that no one can ever fix in their memory, because after that last breath comes nothing. Maybe he’s wondering if it was smart to muster all the venom in his soul in pursuit of the killing he thought would finally make him rich. Or maybe he’s wondering if he made the right decision when he chose this miserable life. Instead of a paycheck for honest work, this: to die like a dog, all alone, bleeding onto a filthy floor in a shithole of an abandoned house. And what does he leave the world as his last bequest? The total nothing that his whole life has amounted to.
“Who did it?”
Making an immense effort, he lifts one hand and raises it to his head. He touches the lank lock of hair and does his best to arrange it on top of his head, in a last clumsy impulse of vanity. I reach out and help him to put his comb-over, glistening with hairspray and dye, back into place.
I repeat the question.
“Who did it, Daytona? Where’s Carla?”
He stares at me without seeing me. He seems to be reliving a scene I never witnessed. Perhaps the scene in which someone killed him. Maybe, the way people say, he’s reliving his whole life. Then he shuts his eyes.
“White … ice…”
They’re his last words.
A surge of nausea rushes up from my stomach and into my throat. I stand up, walk a step or two away, and then I fold over like a switchblade knife snapping shut.
I vomit.
Long, painful bouts of retching that seem to turn my stomach inside out and split my head in two. When I’m done throwing up, I’m covered with a film of clammy sweat. I’m sorry that my funeral eulogy for Daytona was nothing more than a noisy regurgitation that brought back the fried wontons transformed into an acid porridge.
I pull out my handkerchief and wipe my mouth.
I see that he still has his precious gold Daytona Rolex on his wrist, the watch that kept time through the ups and downs of his life—a w
atch that formed a larger part of his identity than his own first and last names in a certain Milanese milieu. I slip the watch off his wrist, with the thought that the only part of him that’s still ticking is this timepiece. I drop it into my jacket pocket. As soon as I can, I’ll get it to that poor woman who was his mother, with whom I share this unenviable fate: finding out in the worst way possible just who her son really was.
My last few remaining shreds of intelligence urge me to get out of this place as quickly as possible. I can’t help thinking that if I’d managed to get here just a few minutes earlier, I might be lying on the floor next to Daytona right now, with all warmth and color slowly seeping out of my body. I take one last look at the corpse of a man who I once thought was my friend, forgetting that in reality no one ever truly is. A poor pathetic two-bit loser but, in spite of everything, maybe someone who didn’t deserve what happened to him. I turn to go, abandoning him on the floor of that shithole, as his body’s blood seeps into his clothing. Perhaps tonight will be the first night in many years that he’ll spend without staying up till sunrise.
And without waking up later that afternoon.
I head downstairs and retrace my steps back to the Mini. I get in, start the engine, and pull away from this house that smells of decreptitude, neglect, wasted time, and death. My shivering is worse, the burning pain keeps flaming away in my groin, and the fact that I vomited does nothing to lessen this nausea that seems to fill my stomach with foam.
I press my hand against my forehead. It feels hot. Maybe it’s just an impression, maybe it’s a fever, maybe it’s my body’s reaction after watching Daytona in his death throes. It’s the price of the anguish, of feeling my way along without any clear idea of what’s going on around me.
This isn’t one of the pastimes that Lucio and I share, a puzzle passed back and forth between a couple of minds held prisoner by bodies that house them against their will. I have the feeling that this is a final, terminal enigma, a puzzle whose solution might be worse than the puzzle itself.
I’m a pathetic warrior, alone and frightened, scared of dying in the dark.
I take the road along which I came and continue in the same direction out to the beltway, without returning to the city. It strikes me as the safer alternative to avoid retracing my route, not to pass the same windows and the same courtyards twice. For the rest of the ride home, Daytona’s last words keep tormenting me, last words that were murmured in a voice that was already no longer that of a living creature.
“White ice.” What is “white ice,” and what does it have to do with anything?
I say the words over and over in my head, as if I were solving a cryptic clue, and finally, as I drag out the final s sound of ice while I make a tight right turn, it occurs to me that Daytona might not have finished the word. A sign flashes before my mind’s eye: the White Isis.
What does the White Isis have to do with anything?
It’s a public bath and day hotel located under Via Silvio Pellico, in the Galleria del Duomo. There’s another one in Piazza Oberdan, at Porta Venezia. It’s a place where you can take a shower or a bath, find a barber or get a manicure, make a phone call, stop at the bar, or leave your luggage. It’s part of a chain of similar facilities set up by an industrialist in the early twenties in many large Italian cities: Milan, Bologna, Turin, Rome, and Naples. At the time, since bathrooms in private homes weren’t all that common, they were used as public baths. Still, the use of expensive materials and fine furnishings made them relatively refined settings, a gathering place frequented by a high-end clientele, traveling for business or pleasure.
I wonder just what role can be played in this whole story by an institution that, given the development of Italian society and the Italian economy, is destined to vanish, a place that will someday be a distant memory, a curiosity, a piece of social archaeology to be looked back upon as an artifact of a way of life and an era that are gone forever.
What does a public bath serving hundreds of people every day have to do with the murder of ten or so human beings in a luxurious villa outside Lesmo? It strikes me as decidedly unlikely that such an overtly public facility could become a hiding place for anyone. Or else I’m completely missing the point and the answer to this question can be found in the old saying that the best place to hide something is in plain view.
I turn off the beltway onto the exit that puts me on Via Vigevanese, heading for my house. On the far side of the exit ramp are various buildings and industrial sheds housing retail outlets and businesses. High atop one of those buildings is the sign of an extermination service. Once, after the umpteenth all-nighter with Daytona and Beefsteak, I took this exit and as I did, I heard Beefsteak’s voice pipe up from the backseat.
“Ehi, chì ciapen i danee per masà i ratt.”
Remembering that I’m not from Milan and don’t understand the dialect, he repeated it in Italian, for my benefit.
“Over there they make their chips by killing mice.”
He thought it over for just a fraction of a second, that tiny interval that is more than enough for a genius to translate intuition into words.
“You want to know the company’s slogan?”
He went on without waiting for my answer.
“I hate those meeces to pieces!”
We laughed like three idiots when we heard that perfect imitation of the furious exclamation uttered regularly by Mr. Jinks, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon cat from the Huckleberry Hound Show. Wisecracks, jokes, and laughter that seem to belong to centuries past, when we moved through time without understanding what was going on around us.
Safe in bed after watching the evening television shows that always ended with the ten-minute block of kid-friendly ads and sketches known as Carosello.
But after twenty years they shut Carosello down, leaving us without landmarks or stars to steer by and the long hours of the night ahead of us, demanding to be filled. During my ride in Tulip’s car I remember I thought, as I looked out at the city lights, that for many people it would be a rude awakening to discover that the party they were promised was actually already over. I hadn’t expected that moment to come so soon. I hadn’t expected it to come for me.
Some kind of rage makes me set my jaw and increases my nausea.
I wonder what the people who knew Daytona will say when they hear about his death. I wonder what Detective Stefano Milla will think and do when he learns that a man was found dead, murdered, at the address that he gave me under the table. There’s one thing for sure: I can’t sit on the sofa in my apartment like an idiot, waiting for him to come ask me to explain just what happened, either in his official capacity or otherwise.
This time I drive through the front gate and park right outside the glass doors of the front lobby. I’m going to come back out immediately with a travel bag in my hand, and I feel too ill to carry it all the way outside the enclosure wall.
I walk upstairs, hoping I don’t run into Lucio. The meeting I fear doesn’t take place and I’m relieved. I don’t want to get sucked against my will into a battle of wits that has become a routine over time, to the point that the banter has eliminated any form of communication between us aside from cryptic puzzles and puns of various kinds.
Now that the stakes are higher, everything strikes me as stupid and infantile. Death is a prima donna: it manages to focus all attention on itself. And the attention that it attracts is all the more hypnotic the stranger the circumstances in which death makes its appearance. At the same time, one way or another, death has a way of making everyone a star. I’m learning that at my own expense, now that everywhere I turn I seem to find bloody bodies strewn around me. And apparently every one of those bodies is pointing a finger straight at me.
When I get up to the apartment I’m ready to rush into the bathroom and throw up again. In my haste, a splash of vomit stains the hem of my jacket. I take it off and throw it into the dirty laundry hamper.
I wash my face and glimpse myself in the mirror.
>
What I see before me is no longer the face of the man I once knew. There are circles around my eyes; my complexion is yellowish; my lips are dry, chapped, with flakes of skin here and there. There are traces of cobwebs in my hair, which I must have picked up without realizing it as I explored the farmhouse.
Gone is the handsome and useless young man who used to make women say If it was you, I’d do it for free … and who failed to understand, despite his cynicism and egotism, that it was a lie. That young man must be stretched out dead on the floor next to Daytona back in that shithole. The man looking at me now is someone else. Now it’s my job to find out just how different he is, before the others can make it clear.
I take off my shirt and send it to join the jacket in the hamper. I pull a clean shirt out of the armoire in the hallway and grab a travel bag. I lay it out on the bed and turn on the television. I flip through the channels in search of a news program. The first and second RAI channels, Telemilano, Antenna 3, plus a couple of other channels that the newspapers describe as local networks. All I find is programs for kids and other crap of that sort.
I turn off that useless device and turn on the clock radio on my nightstand.
I start filling the travel bag with clothing and other necessaries for a short trip. The whole time, from the radio’s tiny speaker, Claudio Baglioni’s voice sings to me about Tunisia and suggests going away, far far away. I wish he was in the room right now, singing to me, so I could tell him how happy I’d be to do as he says.
When the travel bag is full, to the notes of an old song by the Dik Dik, I start to open my special safe, the one that the police were unable to find when they searched the apartment.
The bed is made of wrought iron, with round legs on either side of the headboard and footboard. They’re a little taller and fatter than average and are topped by brass knobs. I kneel down by the first leg and give a ring on the base a 360-degree turn; at first glance the ring looks like nothing more than a decorative touch. That turn releases the brass knob, but it can be unscrewed only by turning it clockwise, in the opposite direction of a normally threaded object. Simple enough but, to judge from the results, highly effective. Inside the leg is a light cylindrical container made of transparent plastic, attached to the knob with a length of twine. I extract it and remove the plug that closes it. I lay it on the bed and spill out the rolls of cash it contains. I repeat the operation with the three other legs, and now I have all my cash and the 490 million lire that, for the moment, is represented only by a Totocalcio lottery ticket.
A Pimp's Notes Page 21