I’m in the presence of a hard, emotionless, pitiless person.
A murderer.
“Go on.”
“Error number two: in the envelope that Daytona gave me to hand over there was nothing but a stack of cut newspapers.”
Lucio leaps to his feet, his features tense and drawn, showing that he actually does possess a nervous system.
“That chicken thief was a greedy, slippery idiot. There was supposed to be real money in that envelope. He stole it, thinking that no one would ever know.”
I wave him seated with the muzzle of the handgun. By the time his ass is flat on the chair again, he has regained his composure.
“You killed him, didn’t you?”
His calm becomes nonchalance.
“Yes, I did. And I enjoyed it, I have to say. That piece of shit was a menace to everyone he came into contact with. In the end, he was only a menace to himself.”
That’s what I’d figured. I should have guessed from the start that the White Isis had nothing to do with it. That poor devil was gasping for his last few breaths. When I asked him who it was, when I asked him where Carla had gone, White ice was the last thing he managed to utter. What he was actually trying to say was: the guy with white eyes.
Or something of the sort.
It makes me mad to hear Lucio talk like that about Daytona. It makes me mad to think that he’s responsible for the death of three beautiful young women. It makes me mad to think that he killed the men of the security detail, who were guilty of nothing but doing their job. It makes me mad to think that he’s played with me like a toy. My fondest wish is to pull the trigger and lodge a bullet in his skull, two bullets, three bullets …
With the comfort of a silencer, capable of transforming three gunshots into three hushed arrows.
Pfft … pfft … pfft …
Maybe I’ll do it. But not right away. There are still things he needs to tell me.
And he knows that.
His irony surfaces again, except that now it’s veering over into the spiteful realm of contempt.
“It’s hard to resist, isn’t it?”
“Resist what?”
“It’s hard to resist the temptation to pull the trigger when you’re looking at someone you hate.”
“What do you do in those cases?”
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
“Oscar Wilde.”
He looks at me with some surprise that I knew the source of his quote. His eyes are dark; they seem to be trying to enter into me.
“Who are you, Bravo?”
“Somebody who wants information, sitting across from someone who can supply it.”
I give him a moment to think it over, so that he can fully appreciate the roles that have been assigned.
“Let me tell you a few things. I’m just going to ask you to interrupt me when I get something wrong.”
Step by step I lay out my reconstruction of events for him, as I composed it in my head during my time in Carmine’s apartment. The role that Carla played, Daytona’s part, the murder of Tulip, Laura’s defection, the maneuver to deprive me of an alibi, the elimination of witnesses, right up to my own suicide as the epilogue of a story that began and ended in total delirium.
I get to the end without being interrupted even once.
Then he deigns to give me the luxury of his consideration.
“You’re smarter than I thought.”
“It’s not that I’m smarter than you thought. It’s that you’re not as smart as you thought you were.”
“Is that what you think?”
“That’s what I think.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He smiles at me and for just a second I see Lucio’s old expression, the one he used to put on when he made a wisecrack. It’s there for only an instant and then it’s gone, like all pleasant memories when they’re replaced by the present.
After which he looks at a point somewhere over my shoulder.
“Take his gun.”
The moment he utters that word, I feel something small, round, and hard press against the nape of my neck. It doesn’t take me long to figure out that it’s the muzzle of a pistol. From behind my back comes a voice that won’t take no for an answer.
Chico’s voice.
“Throw the gun on the couch. And put your hands up.”
Then I hear another voice. I know this one too.
“And don’t get any funny ideas. There are two of us.”
I toss the gun on the couch, hoping it might go off and kill someone. As stupid as I feel right now, it’d be fine with me if the one it killed was me. The first rule is to inspect the apartment, and I ignored that rule because I was so anxious to glory in my idiotic triumph.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
The pressure on the back of my neck lightens.
“Move over to the wall.”
I move as instructed. Giorgio Fieschi walks into my field of view and reaches down to the couch. He picks up the Beretta, making it the second gun pointing at me. Seeing him here, for some reason, doesn’t surprise me all that much.
“So you’re in on this, too.”
“As you can see.”
There’s nothing left of the clean and naïve young man who used to hang out at the Ascot Club. He has the determined face and the brisk motions of a professional. This is an evening of revelations and transformations. I look at him and I see him on the stage. Young, talented, with the world in the palm of his hand. If it’s true what I thought at the time—that the other artists were afraid of his skills—I think now how astonished they would be to discover how much more afraid of him they should have been.
I realize to my astonishment that I’m not afraid of him. I’m just disappointed. The way you are whenever you see a missed opportunity.
“You’re good. You’re brilliant, I have to say. You could have done important things.”
He looks at me the way you’d look at a mental defective.
“I’m doing them.”
“Was Laura one of them?”
He shrugs with indifference.
“Laura was a whore. She sold her ass to the highest bidder. No better than you. We’re at war, and in terms of the goal we’re fighting for, she was nothing but a pawn we were willing to sacrifice.”
Lucio breaks in. He’s still sitting where he was, expressionless as he watches his comrades reduce me from threatening to threatened. I too have undergone my own little transformation.
“As you have no doubt figured out for yourself, so are you.”
Without a word, I wait for the rest.
He stands up and takes a step toward me. We look each other in the eye, which is something we could have done a long time ago if he weren’t he and I weren’t I.
“Bravo, I don’t believe that however much I might explain it to you, you can ever understand what’s happening in this country. You belong to the category of people who don’t pay attention to what’s around them. People who could walk through a concentration camp without noticing its horrors because they’re on their way to get an aperitif at the Bar Tre Gazzelle. While you were sleeping your days away and fooling yourself that you were living by night, the world changed and none of you noticed. There was 1968, then 1977, class warfare, armed battles in the streets. All of them things without meaning for you. Worse still, things you knew nothing about. You’re nothing but a faint mist, a stretch of nothingness between good and evil.”
“It strikes me as obvious that you believe evil is the people you kidnap, hurt, and kill. I think it’s equally obvious that you believe that good is the things that you do.”
He shakes his head, bitterly.
“No. We’re only an armed force in the service of good, willing to resemble evil in order to become strong enough to defeat it.”
“You’re insane.”
He replies as if this were the real solution to every puzzle.
“No, Bravo. I’m a dead man.
Just like you are.”
Chico breaks in to interrupt this secular confession.
“What do we do now?”
I take a look at him. He’s a young man, a little shorter than average, with curly hair and sideburns that make him look like a hippie at Woodstock. The civic-minded volunteer serving as a companion for a blind man has just tossed a practical question onto the table.
Giorgio Fieschi puts in his two cents, with a hint of impatience in his voice.
“We’ve got to get out of here. And fast. I’m not comfortable in this place.”
“There’s a car with two plainclothes policemen watching the front entrance. How can we get him out of here without them seeing us?”
Chico has just confirmed a problem that I had already identified and worked around myself, in the path I took to get into the apartment building. Behind the shelter of a stand of trees, I’d climbed over the enclosure wall at the corner of its longer perimeter, opposite the building, where it borders a field overgrown with bushes. Then I walked along the wall, crouching low so as to remain out of the line of sight of the two plainclothesmen sitting in the suspicious-looking Alfa Romeo.
I was counting on the fact that the watch that the police put on the apartment building would probably be reasonably perfunctory, since no one really thought that I’d be stupid enough to try to come back to my own apartment. But obviously that same route can’t be taken more than once, and certainly not by a group of people.
Lucio studies me as if this were the first time he’s laid eyes on me. His eyes remain on me while his mind goes somewhere else. When he returns, he brings the spark of intuition with him.
“I’ve got an idea. You all wait here.”
Lucio leaves the room and vanishes down the hallway.
The three of us sit in this living room without sharp edges or corners, each of us with a deep and abiding certainty. The two of them that they’re in the right. Me, that I’ve come to the end of the line. This time there won’t be any guardian angels to protect me, the way they did when it was Tulip holding a gun on me. Now those angels have become the threat, the mortal danger.
We wait in silence, because everything we could say to each other in the same language has already been said. Going any further would be nothing more than a pointless journey to Babel.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway announces Lucio’s return. He comes in carrying a guitar. He’s shaved off his long and unkempt beard. He’s got a long brunette wig on his head and a fake mustache of the same color. It’s not the most realistic looking getup, but it’s nighttime and he can rely on the fact that all cats are gray in the dark.
He smiles at the expression on my face.
“We all need to be actors in life, don’t you think?”
He walks over to the coatrack and pulls down his jacket and the hat he usually wears. He tosses them over to me, forcing me to reach out and grab them in midair.
“You made things easier for us when you cut your hair and left your face unshaven. It makes us look very much alike, if you take into account the fact that we both have roughly the same build. The plainclothes officers out there are expecting to see a blind musician leave the building with his usual volunteer companion. And that’s exactly what we’ll give them, but this time with an extra fan in the entourage.”
Chico understands and smiles. He holds the pistol out to Lucio, who makes it become part of his hand in an entirely natural way.
“I’ll bring the car around. Then I’ll come up to get you and the guitars.”
He leaves, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze through. Giorgio Fieschi asks for instructions for himself.
“I came on my motorcycle. What should I do?”
“Wait fifteen minutes after we leave. Then catch up with us in the place you know.”
Lucio has the confidence of a born leader, and he’s capable of transmitting it to his men. I’m pretty sure that this whole masquerade is amusing him, as well as giving him a surge of adrenaline. When he notices that I’m still standing motionless in the middle of the room with the jacket and hat in my hand, he waves the gun at me impatiently. In fact, he repeats the exact same gesture that I employed when I told him to sit down.
“What are you waiting for? Get dressed.”
I shrug on the jacket and clap Lucio’s hat on my head. He steps over to the table. He gathers up his contact lenses, looks at them with a faint smile, then slips them into his pocket. He picks up the dark glasses and tosses them to me. I put them on, losing a little light and a few details in the bargain. There are no mirrors in the apartment to check the results, but I’m pretty sure that the rule governing cats and the dark applies to me as well as Lucio.
My impression is confirmed by none other than him.
“You’re perfect. I don’t have time to give you guitar lessons, but I don’t think you’re going to be asked to play.”
The car must have been parked nearby because it’s only a couple of minutes before there’s a knock at the door. Giorgio walks over and lets Chico in, but only after cautiously opening the peephole and checking to make sure it’s him.
“We can go.”
Chico comes close to me and locks arms with me, holding me on his left. His voice lacks the tone of kindness he used when he did this with Lucio. His gestures are harsh and powerful. His right hand jams the muzzle of the pistol against my side.
“Walk nice, short steps. Don’t look where you’re putting your feet, just look straight ahead of you. I’ll guide you.”
To emphasize the order he jams the barrel of the gun roughly into my ribs.
“Is that clear?”
I nod my head yes.
Giorgio opens the door. The first ones down the stairs are me and Chico. Lucio walks down the stairs with the guitars in hand, bringing up the rear. The night air is cool and there’s no one in sight. It’s a last little scrap of winter, discouraging loiterers and open-air conversations. The car, a white Opel Kadett, is parked directly outside the glass doors.
One guitar is placed in the trunk, the other is propped up in the backseat, behind the driver and next to Chico. I’m in the passenger seat. There’s a handgun discreetly aimed at me the whole time. As soon as Lucio starts the engine, I feel the muzzle of the pistol rise back up to tickle the nape of my neck.
We pull out.
Without any unexpected problems, we leave the Quartiere Tessera behind us, with all its police surveillance and all its indifference. I wonder to myself whether Lucio will ever be able to get over this part of his life. I look at him as he drives wordlessly, curious to see him for the first time doing something that I thought was forever forbidden to him.
He’d be surprised to know just how similar we are, how much time we’ve both spent hiding, pretending to be something that we’ve never been, while waiting to understand something that we’d never become.
I think it’s too late now anyway. None of it would change a thing. Now that everything’s been unveiled, there’s only one thing that Lucio can devote the rest of his life to. The thing that makes his gaze harden, the thing that persuaded him to abandon the world of words and conversation and to take up arms. Every revolution has its victims and its martyrs. I have the feeling that I’m going to leave this life without any idea of which role I’ve been assigned.
As we pull onto the beltway heading east, I take off my sunglasses and look out the car window at the lights of Milan. I’m not wearing a blindfold, which means that my captors aren’t worried about letting me see where they’re taking me. In any case, it’ll become obvious immediately, as soon as they stage whatever it is they intend me to take part in. If you stop to think about it, it’s all just theater. Though in this case the show will end after opening night, because death never sticks around for a repeat performance.
19
We exit the beltway at Viale Forlanini, in the direction of Linate Airport.
Lucio drives, his face illuminated intermittently by the lights of onco
ming cars and streetlamps, his eyes riveted to the road. He’s taken off the wig and false mustache and he’s gone back to being himself. Which is to say, someone that I don’t really know at all. He’s lit a cigarette, and that gives me a clear gauge of his chilly self-control. There was never the slightest whiff of tobacco in his apartment—never a trace of this addiction. Which means he never smoked, even when there was no one there to see him.
I wonder what his life would have been like if he’d dedicated his considerable gifts and determination to something constructive instead of all this destruction. I answer myself with the thought that maybe he tried, pursuing an ideal that day by day shrank to an idea, until music stopped being his refuge and turned into his hiding place. I answer myself that maybe he is wondering the same thing about me.
We come to the end of the boulevard and our way is cleared by a green traffic light allowing us to make a quick left turn, down toward the Idroscalo. We leave the lights of the airport behind us, where at this time of night there are few passengers and infrequent flights. The dull roar of a plane taking off promises a new horizon, but instead it’s just one more trip toward identical situations and different people. The illusion lasts no longer than the time between takeoff and landing, with the sole comfort of a fitful sleep in an uncomfortable seat. We drive around the outskirts of the Luna Park. The amusement park is closed: the stalls where you can win a goldfish have their shutters pulled down, the skeletal attractions stand immersed in the darkness, and the flying saucers are all covered with canvas tarps. The next ride, the next thrill: they’re all done for the day, and it’ll be tomorrow before there’s another chance to knock down the pyramid of milk bottles.
For the duration of the trip, no one has spoken. Chico, in the backseat, has relaxed, and the pressure of the pistol muzzle on the back of my neck is gone now. Still, I’m sure the gun is in his hand, aimed straight at my head. One false move on my part, a light tug on the trigger, and
pfft …
with the sound of an air rifle, my skull would shatter like a plaster target at the shooting range. What I once was would be nothing more than the red spray of blood on the windshield, in a macabre airbrushed pattern.
A Pimp's Notes Page 25