For All the Gold in the World (17 page)

It had to be either Giacomo or Denis. Probably one was staying inside while the other one hid in the darkness outside. So the widow had chosen to wage war. She'd spirited her daughter to safety and now she was waiting for the butchers who had murdered her husband. It wasn't an intelligent strategy—assuming of course that she hadn't devised some other diabolical twist.

I went back to my car and called her.

“That wasn't very nice of you, trying to kill me the other day,” I said.

“Don't exaggerate. I just wanted to do a little embroidery work on your face to convince you to be more cooperative.”

“Horseshit. You lost control,” I shot back. “Anyway, I assumed you were on the Riviera and instead you're barricaded in your home with a gorilla standing guard that even a blind man wouldn't miss.”

She remained silent for ten seconds or so, the time it took her to understand I wasn't far away. “Where are you?”

“Nearby, if that's what you're asking, but it never crossed my mind to come pay a call on you,” I replied. “For now I'm happy just to talk. Nicola Spezzafumo could be a subject we both find interesting.”

“And why would that be?”

“Yesterday he crossed the line. And he's never stepping back over it.”

“That's what you say.”

“You know that's how things are going to go.”

“So what if they do?”

“Well then, we might be able to make a deal. Either you and his orphans devote yourselves to honest, hardworking lives here in the homeland, or else you emigrate to the Americas like Venetians in the nineteenth century, and every last reason we might have to bicker will be forgotten.”

More silence. Longer this time. “It seems to me like an offer to be taken into consideration.”

I closed my eyes to concentrate on every single word. “Then we can talk it over,” I confirmed.

“Of course we can! The sooner we end this mess, the better it is for everyone.”

“Nick is an old friend of yours,” I countered.

“And I'll remember him fondly for as long as I live,” said Gigliola.

She was lying. I was sure of it. By now she was an open book. After Kevin Fecchio's murder, she'd understood that she could start the gang back up, continue with the old plan to pull off a few more jobs, and then leave the country. And flourish somewhere else. Tear off the mask of a grieving widow and become what she'd always dreamed of.

With Nicola Spezzafumo in place of Gastone Oddo. Probably they were already planning a robbery, no matter how clear old Rossini had been when he'd warned them not to keep any of their criminal activities up.

With her and Spezzafumo, there was no room for negotiation, but taking it to the bitter end would mean a defeat for everyone. For the living and for the dead. I was sure she'd done her math and double-checked it; I was also confident she'd taken into account the fact that our rules prohibited sending a mother whose daughter had no father into a premature grave, even if that mother was a criminal of Gigliola Pescarotto's caliber.

The unwritten laws that guided the world of illegal activities were complicated and difficult to interpret. They were part of a world on the verge of extinction, a world to which we stubbornly belonged. The globalization of organized crime that represented the onset of modernity had eliminated all these laws. The only regulatory bonds guiding organizations now were relationships of force. We were among the few free men still scrupulously observing the rules. It was the only way to protect the weak, the victims. Along with our consciences.

I went back to Padua and dropped by Pico's. This wasn't the right evening to see Cora but I wanted to have a chat with the piano player. When the jazz woman was off, he played in a trio with a guitarist and a clarinetist.

I waited for the first intermission to intercept him at the bar.

“Can I get you something?”

He glared at me. “He's the one you ought to treat to a drink,” he replied, pointing at the barman who nodded with a smile.

“Okay, but do you mind if I ask why?”

“Last night, Cora's husband handed me ten euros to tell him if there was anyone buzzing around her,” he snickered while he made a gin and tonic.

My blood ran cold. “And what did you tell him?”

“That I didn't know a thing. For ten euros I'm not getting my hands dirty, but for fifty . . .”

I pulled out my wallet and slapped two fifty-euro bills down on the table. “One of these is for you and the other one covers the musicians' tabs.”

He made them disappear with all the skill of a prestidigitator.

“Then what did the husband do?” I asked.

“Nothing. He listened and left before the show was over.”

“Did she see him?”

“I'll say she did! I've never seen her so pissed off.”

And once they both got back home, there would have been a screaming fight. I felt sorry for Cora. She didn't want her husband to discover her island of freedom but I couldn't keep the secret; it would only have made him more suspicious. “What a fucking mess,” I thought to myself, as I decided to stay on and drink another couple of glasses.

I got home slightly tipsy and was introduced to Antun and Dalibor, two taciturn Dalmatians that old Rossini had called in, just in case we ended up needing to use our guns. They were both more or less Beniamino's age, and they looked so menacing that I decided not to ask them any questions about their pasts. In the former Yugoslavia, organized crime hadn't remained neutral and on more than one occasion had played a decisive role in operations of ethnic cleansing.

“Rossini is coming back,” Max informed me. “There's absolutely no one anywhere near the boy.”

I gestured to our guests with a nod. “We have our own mercenaries,” I whispered.

“You're wrong,” the fat man retorted. “They're here out of friendship. Rossini is godfather to their grandchildren, but that doesn't mean they're not ‘lethal killing machines.' That's how our friend described them.”

“I'm going to bed,” I announced. To help me fall asleep, I searched for an especially soporific channel. I concentrated on a televised sale of toiletry products for senior citizens. I collapsed without even getting up to turn off the TV.

 

We all have our own little obsessions, our harmless idiosyncrasies that, with the years, become routine. I, for instance, quickly tire of any given shaving cream. After a couple of months I toss it out because I can't stand it anymore. An appointment, every morning, with the same blend of scents, the same consistency of foam, annoys me and, at the same time, makes me suspect that the shaving cream in question isn't of the highest quality or, in any, case isn't well suited to my skin.

And so I bade farewell to a Portuguese shaving cream beloved of barbers all over the world since the turn of the twentieth century, tossing the tube into the trash.

I decided that very same morning to visit a popular perfumery in the center of town where a shopgirl, a particularly cute one, by the way, had no difficulty talking me into purchasing expensive niche products that, to judge from their packaging, looked more like old leftovers from some warehouse.

The kitchen table was set as if for a wedding feast, certainly not for breakfast. Beniamino's two friends had brought a number of bottles of plum grappa, as well as sheep's milk cheeses.

I tossed back a couple of shots before dipping a croissant into my
caffè latte
. During my second cigarette, smoked in blessed peace, absorbed in the reading of one of the many daily papers purchased by the fat man, the cell phone rang. The one whose number only the Patanès knew.

“Hello?”

“We agree to a meeting,” Ferdinando stammered.

“At ten o'clock tonight on the banks of the canal where poor Kevin ‘committed suicide.' You know the place well.”

I went back to the kitchen, where Max was holding forth on the Greek situation, which still dominated the front page of all the newspapers. “Tonight we have the Patanès,” I announced.

“Good!” Beniamino exclaimed. “Finally something's starting to move. But in the meanwhile, we have to make sure we don't lose track of Spezzafumo.”

“I'll take care of it,” I said and went to get dressed. Before going out I pulled a couple of rolls of cash out of a hiding place built into a credenza by some clever carpenter. There were a couple more hiding places scattered around the apartment. We only used cash. We had no bank accounts, and we were completely unfamiliar with credit and debit cards. Leaving traces of your cash transactions was dangerous for individuals who have ‘no visible means of support,' as was printed clearly on our files, still preserved in the archives at police headquarters.

First, I went to see my favorite salesclerk in the shaving section. She broke all the old records by convincing me to buy the entire toiletries line put out by an English house that I'd never heard of before. But she was unable to talk me into the eau de toilette that brought out the fragrance of the aftershave lotion. I'd been using the same eau de toilette for years. It had first been given to me by a woman I'd never forgotten and it carried the name of the sword of the Ottoman knights. Over time, I'd learned to distinguish the top notes from the middle and base notes, and when you're that in tune with a scent, you must never make the mistake of switching to another.

Carrying an elegant paper sack with the shop's logo, I went to a tall building on the outskirts of the downtown. On the sixth floor were the offices of an insurance company. The secretary knew me by sight and wrongly believed I was a client. Between a smile and a flurry of comments on the new heat wave, which the weathermen had dubbed Charon, she ushered me into a claustrophobic waiting room where I leafed through financial planning magazines.

Twenty or so minutes later, I was shown to the office of the big boss. He called himself, quite prosaically Mario Bianchi—an extremely common name—but he was actually a prince of the Venetian underworld. The façade was that of an eminently respectable insurance executive, but the business that had made him rich was that of clandestine investigation. Once or twice, I'd worked for him. He had resources, professionals, and covers at his disposal. And he would stop at nothing. He was rotten to the core, but if you were part of the underworld, you could count on a certain degree of discretion. He'd treated me well because he knew that as long as I was protected by Beniamino Rossini, I remained untouchable.

Neither short nor tall, roly-poly, horn-rimmed glasses, and an unfailingly optimistic expression stamped on his face.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“I need four subjects checked out,” I replied, handing him the list of names and the address of the Pescarotto residence. “One woman and three men. She travels between her home and a small business. Just now, she's being protected by the three men; they take turns. I suspect that they're in the middle of planning a criminal act, a robbery. A few days. I'll inform you once I no longer need the coverage.”

He nodded. “You know the fee.”

I pulled a twelve-thousand-euro retainer out of my pocket and set it down on the desk. At fifteen hundred euros per person, that was equivalent to two days of surveillance. Mario Bianchi commanded a high fee, but in case Spezzafumo went to meet his maker, no one would be able to connect my interest in his person with that murder.

I decided to stay out. An aperitif in the piazzas, lunch at Anfora da Alberto, and then to a multiplex to watch a couple of movies. Why the movie theaters tended to run B-grade horror movies during the summer would forever remain a mystery to me.

I watched two of them just to kill an afternoon in a dark, semi-deserted theater with good air conditioning, but the plots were flabby and contrived.

I turned up at cocktail hour. Max had set the fixings up at home, with delicacies meant to please Antun and Dalibor's palates.

At a certain point Rossini got up. “It's time.”

We arrived at the rendezvous in two cars a good half hour ahead of time. The Patanès and the two ex-mercenaries were already there. Ferdinando was standing behind Lorenzo's wheelchair. Bellomo and Adinolfi played their roles to perfection. They got out of an SUV garbed and armed as if they were expecting a firefight with a platoon of terrorists. All for show. I'd been right when I'd decided that the mercenaries were low-level lackeys. I peered over at the two Dalmatians. They were snickering, unimpressed, the barrels of their assault rifles pointing at the ground. Rossini was holding his pump-action shotgun like a boar hunter would. His eyes were focused on the hands of the two assholes. At the first suspicious move, he'd send a hail of pellets blasting in their direction.

I took a few steps closer, illuminated by the headlights of the cars. I was about twenty yards away from their weapons.

“I'm happy that you've accepted this meeting,” I said, speaking loud enough to make myself heard. “In these situations, talking is always a necessary step in the process of finding a solution. I hope you also appreciate the choice of location. We suggested it to make you understand that so far every decision you've made has been a mistake. Including the decision to eliminate Kevin Fecchio. You were such good friends and yet you didn't hesitate to lure him out here and drown him. I'll bet you got him drunk at the Bad Boys Pub and then you loaded him into the car.”

Adinolfi waved his Kalashnikov. “We didn't come here to listen to this bullshit,” he shouted; he had a strong Roman accent.

“All right. We're listening,” I replied amiably.

“You can take your proposal and stick it up your ass,” the former mercenary went on, his tone combative. “You're in no position to dictate terms. If you want, we can duke it out, here and now. We're not afraid of you. Otherwise, get out of here and don't let us see you again.”