At the End of a Dull Day (13 page)

She started the engine and drove off without saying goodbye. Tortorelli was right about the importance of hierarchies. There were hierarchies for letting off your frustrations, too. Tortorelli took advantage of my subordinate status, and I did the same thing to Nicoletta. And to Martina. And to Gemma. They were essential to my survival. Only the person at the bottom of the pyramid is completely and irremediably fucked. That's why it's so important to find your proper place in the world. Whatever the cost.

 

Martina asked me if for just one night we could skip the ritual of the creams and ointments.

“Why?”

”I just want to lie here on the bed holding you,” she replied in a quavering voice. “I've been so unhappy.”

I did as she asked. “There's no other woman. Just business.”

She hugged me tight. “The important thing is that you're here with me.”

”Let's talk a little,” I suggested, knowing that would make her happy.

I deftly steered her toward the subject that interested me. “How's your father?”

”Worse all the time.”

”I'm sorry to hear that,” I said with a sigh. “I've given a lot of thought to this matter. After all, his illness is having serious repercussions on your mother's and your sisters' lives. I think it's only right to try to do something to make things easier for them.”

She propped herself up on her elbow to look at me. “What do you mean?”

”I talked to a client of mine who's a doctor. I asked him to find out the name of the best medical center in Europe for this condition and he told me about a clinic in Lahnstein, Germany. Apparently they're miracle workers.”

”That would be wonderful.”

”I'll pay for everything and you and your mother could take your father to Germany. There are residential hotels that rent apartments for the patients' families.”

Martina was deeply moved, and I mentally said a word of thanks to the Internet. I'd had no idea how to get Martina out of harm's way, but then it occurred to me that maybe I could take advantage of her father's sickness. I goggled the word “Alzheimer's” and looked around for a clinic somewhere in the deepest countryside. I found it in a little town in Rhineland-Palatinate.

”But we'd have to be apart for such a long time. At least a month, if not longer,” she said in a worried voice. “You have so much work to do with La Nena . . . ”

I put a finger against her lips. “Hush. You're just worried that I might sleep with other women. We already had that conversation a while ago, or am I mistaken?” I snapped out in a harsh voice.

”No, you're not mistaken.”

“And what did you promise me?”

“That I would try to be strong.”

I gave her a kiss. “You know that I love only you, baby doll of mine.”

I moved away from her in the bed and tried to get comfortable and fall asleep. That wasn't what Martina was expecting, and it would upset her, but only a little. The next morning she'd try to find out if something she'd said or done had made me mad. I'd be intentionally evasive and then I'd pretend to take umbrage. An excellent way to start the day before dealing with that asshole the bookkeeper.

 

As we left my accountant's office, Tortorelli informed me that I would be changing all my suppliers. He pulled a list of the new suppliers out of his inside jacket pocket. I'd never heard of any of them.

“But are they good suppliers?” I asked naïvely.

“From our point of view they're the very best suppliers, Pellegrini.”

“If the quality of the restaurant declines, we all stand to lose.”

“No, actually only you do,” he replied in a flat voice. “Because you'll look like an asshole who doesn't know how to run his own place. As far as we're concerned, if we lose customers and have to reduce expenses and staff, that's better.”

He forced me to cross the street and drink an espresso in a café run by the Chinese. It was practically empty except for a couple behind the counter, an Asian playing a slot machine for losers, and a table full of little old men playing cards.

He pointed to the serial number on the receipt. “These guys don't even pretend to have turnover or customers,” he explained. “They launder a million euros with the clear understanding that they're going to lose thirty percent. Six months later they let the Italians take over management again and the bar starts operating normally again. We don't work that way, and at the very most we take a loss of fifteen percent. But we more than make that back by investing the money we've laundered in the public works sector.”

“I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean.”

“Talking to you is just a waste of time, Pellegrini. The important thing is that you understand that we aren't the Chinese mob and that laundering money is both an art and a science.”

We went back to La Nena and in just a few hours I realized for the first time that I'd become a marionette. A sense of shame began to wash over me and I felt an intolerable wave of embarrassment. My one slender reed of hope lay in the natural acceleration of events that crime creates in the routine progress of life. For eleven years nothing noteworthy had happened. Then a series of events, beginning with Brianese stealing two million euros from me, had made negative changes in my life that trended toward its ultimate destruction. It was only a matter of time. But now my “criminal” reaction would trigger a new and unpredictable acceleration of events. That was my science, and killing was my art. I sighed and secretly hoped that I'd soon have an opportunity to show Tortorelli the precision and beauty of what I knew how to do.

Something important happened the following day, when I got a phone call from an officer at my bank who specialized in investments. He wanted to compliment me on the steady growth of revenue, which was growing by about a thousand euros a day. He asked if we could meet to examine a financial plan.

That's how I discovered that the bookkeeper was adding money to the day's take before taking it to the night depository. More or less thirty thousand euros a month. More money was coming in through the network of suppliers. It added up to about a million or 1.5 million euros a year. He must have other resources, otherwise it made no sense to take over a restaurant and put a man there full time.

But the interesting fact was that Tortorelli had a vault somewhere he was getting cash out of. And the first thing that occurred to me is that vaults are made to be filled up and then emptied.

 

Mikhail got in touch four days later, in the afternoon. Gulping uncomfortably, afraid to face Tortorelli's sardonic smirk, I was forced to ask the bookkeeper for permission to leave the restaurant.

“What could you possibly have to do that's so important?” the bastard took pleasure in asking.

“Family problems.”

“Ah, if the family's involved go right ahread, but be back in time for dinner. I don't feel like getting stuck here.”

As I was pulling onto the highway it started to rain and, shortly thereafter, to hail. I sped up in search of a bridge to take shelter under. A few miles at 100 mph and I found one, but it was too late to save the body from dents. I got back in the car and drove on, indifferent to the pelting ice pellets. My former lawyer or the Palamaras would pay for the bodywork.

The service plaza was more crowded than usual. As soon as I parked the Russian pulled open the passenger side door and sat down beside me.

“A luxury vehicle is only beautiful if it's immaculate,” he launched into a philosophical riff. “Otherwise it's a blight on the landscape. It triggers a Russian's inborn melancholy.”

I rubbed my eyes. “You have something more interesting to tell me, don't you, Mikhail?”

He smiled. “Tortorelli comes from Pero, on the outskirts of Milan,” he began. “He has no criminal record, he owned a food services company that went bankrupt three years ago. He's divorced, and he has two high-school-aged boys. His ex-wife is in a new relationship with a local small businessman.”

“You got this information from the deputy commissioner of police who offers protection to the two Neapolitan ex-hookers you work for.”

“I called in a favor,” he admitted.

“It doesn't strike me as particularly valuable.”

“Well, it's useful to put our man into context,” he hedged in self-justification. “He lives in a suite in a hotel operated by a company with ties to the Palamaras.”

“Which one?”

“The Negresco Palace.”

I knew the place. It opened for business recently, all glass and cement. A nondescript four-star hotel on the outskirts of town, not far from the highway. A number of them had been springing up recently, after the expansion of the trade fair's exhibition space. I wondered if the Calabrians' vault was there.

“The bookkeeper spends all his time in your restaurant,” the Russian went on. “I followed him at night and in the morning. It wasn't hard. He's definitely a creature of habit. When he leaves La Nena he walks to Piazza Vittoria di Lepanto and catches a cab from there to the Negresco Palace. In the morning, he takes a cab back to the piazza, does a few errands, and then goes to work.”

“Doesn't he ever have sex?”

“He calls out and has whores sent up to his hotel room.”

“That's all? You didn't find anything else?” I asked in disappointment.

“There's only one odd detail,” said the Russian, finally coming to the point. “Every Monday the cab that picks him up in the piazza is from a limo service.”

“A limo service,” I echoed him. “Not a medallion cab, a private service.”

Mikhail's lips twisted into a sardonic smile that reminded me, for just a second, of a French actor. “It's always the same driver, and he always has the same car, a Lexus sedan with a gray metallic finish. But here's the thing: the car drives all the way here from Milan, just to take Tortorelli to his hotel.”

“How do you know?”

“I followed him. He dropped off the bookkeeper and went right back to the limo company office.”

“You know what I think? I think that driver is so generous that he just makes the rounds of the various Tortorellis and gives each of them a big fat envelope full of cash.”

“You think?”

I told him about the unprecedented steady growth in turnover at La Nena. “You remember when you asked if I'd decided to rip off the 'Ndrangheta? Well, the way things are going, it's starting to look like a distinct possibility.”

“Then you're going to need a renegade
with big square balls, as you Italians like to say.” The sly smile had reappeared on his face.

“I'll bet you've found me one.”

He stuck his hand out the window and waved it as if he was signaling to someone. A few seconds later the rear door opened and a man got into the car. I looked up into the rearview mirror.

“Hey, asshole,” I shouted. “Get out of my car.”

The Russian put a hand on my arm. “It's him.”

I jerked around to get a better look at him. “But he's black.”

“My name is Hissène and I'm African. I come from Chad,” he corrected me in excellent Italian, spoken with a strong French accent.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, but I still don't understand what the fuck you're doing in my car.”

The Chadian opened the door and spoke to Mikhail. “I think the two of you may need to talk things over. Why don't I wait outside?”

“Why were you so rude to him?” the Russian scolded me.

“Because this is the Veneto and even the traffic cops are on the hunt for illegal immigrants,” I answered indignantly. “He's just the right color to attract plenty of the kind of attention we definitely don't want.”

“You're not thinking about it the right way.”

“Why not?”

“Because there's no way to trace him back to you, and whatever it is you're planning to do, you're going to have to look innocent
afterward
,” he replied, speaking slowly and emphatically. “Let's say we actually decide to steal from the Calabrians . . . What better way to deflect suspicion than having a black guy pull the job?”

“What do you know about him?”

“He was a drug courier for the Nigerian mafia, but he decided to keep the condoms filled with heroin and sell them.”

“So he's a dead man walking.”

“Exactly. They'll just blame other Africans for his death.”

Put in those terms, the whole thing was worth taking into consideration, even though I still had enough objections that I doubted it would work out. “We can only use him when it's time to get tough. We can't think of using him for stakeouts or tailing people.”

“I'll take care of that business.”

“How did you find him?”

“I'm a foreigner myself and I was an illegal immigrant before being hired by the Neapolitans . . . let's say that I know that world.”

I stepped out of the car and waved to him to get in. “I owe you an apology,” I started cobbling together an excuse, “but you caught me off guard. I didn't expect you to be black.” He looked at me without expression.

“Can I ask you a few questions?”

“That depends.”

“Do you know how to shoot?”

“In 2006 I fought for the UFDC to overthrow President Idriss Déby Itno. I'm one of the very few survivors of the march on Ndjamena.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. But I think you're telling me yes.”

“Kalashnikov rifles, Makarov pistols, RPGs . . . ” he reeled off in a weary voice. “The usual checklist of any African war.”

I pointed to the Russian. “Did he tell you how much you'd be paid?”

“Fifty thousand and a passport.”

The passport was just a new lie that Mikhail had added to the pile. I observed him closely. Hissène was young and strong. And he had a handsome, slightly effeminate face with particularly long eyelashes.