The Colombian Mule (7 page)

Bonotto threw his arms out wide. ‘Was . . . All the judge knows is that Beltrame had requested a fresh interview so the Colombian could place a voluntary statement on the record. For all he knows, Arías Cuevas might have provided further evidence against Corradi.'

Max offered Bonotto a cigarette, but he declined it with a wave of his hand. ‘I assume you've come here for a specific reason, Avvocato,' Max said.

‘Sure. We've got to demonstrate right now, before the formal investigation gets under way, that my client had nothing whatsoever to do with this killing. Otherwise I'm going to find myself having to defend him in the High Court on a murder charge. He'd be facing a life sentence. I've already had a word with the governor of Santa Maria Maggiore and he gave me a clear indication that in order to avoid any awkward questions he's considering supporting the Public Prosecutor's case.'

I drank a sip of Calvados. ‘We'll clarify the situation as soon as we can. We'll be activating a communication channel that should give us some useful information very fast.'

The lawyer got up and pulled the usual yellow envelope from the inside pocket of his overcoat. ‘Okay. I knew I could count on you. I hope you'll have something for me by tomorrow.'

We watched him weave his way rapidly between the tables as he made for the door. ‘Well, it certainly wasn't Corradi,' I said, thinking aloud. ‘Wasn't the cops either. So who killed the guy?'

‘Excellent question,' said Rossini, putting on his overcoat.

‘Let's go and have a little chat with Corporal Mansutti. If we hurry, we should find him at the nightclub pawing that girl from Thailand.'

 

It was a freezing cold night, as black as pitch. The roads were icy but Rossini insisted on driving his powerful and flashy mobster's car with his foot hard down on the floor. ‘Someone is playing dirty,' he said, fiddling with his bracelets.

I turned up the heating. ‘That's about the only thing we know for sure. The problem is we haven't got the slightest idea as to who or what is driving events. It can't just be police headquarters' appetite for revenge.'

An hour later we pulled into the car-park at the Bulli & Pupe nightclub in Prata di Pordenone. The bouncer immediately recognized Rossini and insisted on accompanying us in person to the bar. Rossini stopped a waiter he knew and murmured something in his ear. The waiter nodded and Beniamino gave me a wink. Mansutti was there all right.

I leaned on the bar as our drinks—on the house, as always—were poured. I looked around the dance-floor. The prevailing color was blue. The lighting, calculated to create a mood of bogus intimacy, made the atmosphere even heavier. The girls at the tables were all displaying an exaggerated interest in their clients' chit-chat. As I filled my nostrils with the scent rising from a glass of excellent Calvados, I felt a hand brush against my wrist.

I turned round to encounter the eyes of a beautiful young woman looking back at me.

‘Hi,' she said.

‘Hi.'

‘My name's Jana. Want to buy me a drink?'

I took a good look at her. The cone of light from an eyeball downlighter in the ceiling of the bar lit up one side of her face. I glanced down at her breasts and then at her legs. The tops of her hold-ups were peeping out from beneath the hem of her skirt. I motioned with my thumb to the barman to give her a drink. He poured her a glass of champagne and passed her a numbered card, which she slipped into her handbag. When the bar closed, the cards would be counted and the girls paid in cash. To the girls, every drink their customer purchased was worth 10,000 lire. In that kind of business, every little helped.

‘My name's Jana,' she said again. ‘I'm from Poland. Do you know Poland?'

I shook my head. I felt a little uneasy but there was nowhere I could go. Rossini was busy saying hello to a couple of hostesses he knew well, and I would just have to wait till he got back before I could talk to Mansutti. Meeting the screw at a nightclub was not a wise move, but we were in a hurry to find out precisely what had happened at the prison. There was no time to wait for him outside the usual osteria. I tried to focus on my drink.

‘Don't you want to talk?' the Polish girl asked.

‘No, I don't. But if you want to have another drink, you can stick around.'

‘Solitary type, right? Problems of the heart, no doubt. If you want, we can go somewhere nice and quiet to talk it over.'

Jana was clearly a very determined hostess, the kind that doesn't let go of a client till she has squeezed him dry. I had no choice but to be rude to her and she stalked off, muttering something doubtless unflattering in Polish.

Rossini arrived at long last and beckoned me to follow him. Mansutti was entertaining his new flame in a private booth, and not at all happy to see us. He had one of his hands stuck down the girl's cleavage and left it there as a sort of challenge until Rossini told the girl to leave. She promptly obeyed, and as she edged past I handed her a couple of 50,000 lire notes.

Mansutti wagged a finger at us. ‘I know exactly why you're here. But I've got nothing to say about the killing of that Colombian.'

A malicious grin cut across Rossini's face. Moving with lightning speed, he seized Mansutti by the testicles and squeezed hard. The jailer's mouth fell open in pain and surprise. Without making a sound he slid to the floor, curled up in the foetus position, and vomited. Rossini helped him on his way with a couple of powerful punches to the kidneys. Then he settled himself back comfortably, with one of his elegant chamois leather shoes resting on Mansutti's cheek.

We sat and observed Mansutti's contortions for about five minutes. When he had pulled himself together, Rossini yanked him up by the lapels and sat him back down in his chair. The blue lighting accentuated his pallor. One side of his face and hair was covered in vomit and he stank like a drain.

‘You're nothing but a slobbering piece of shit,' Rossini reminded him. ‘We have a deal and when I snap my fingers I want to see you jump and dance like a performing flea.'

‘Please don't hurt me.'

‘That's up to you, dickhead.'

I handed Mansutti a glass of fake champagne, which he gulped down thirstily. ‘Tell us what happened to the Colom­bian,' I urged him in a fatherly tone of voice.

‘The duty sergeant made the big mistake of assigning to his cell a pair of fellow Colombians who'd been brought in for attempted theft. They're the only ones who could have poisoned him. They were there for just one night. The next day they were tried and deported. The governor wants to cover it all up. Otherwise he, his deputy, and all the daytime officers are in deep shit.'

Rossini and I glanced at each other. ‘So they've decided to pin it on Corradi, right?' I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

‘Yeah. They've got the backing of Commissario Nunziante so they're feeling pretty relaxed about it,' Mansutti replied.

‘Get yourself home,' I told him.

‘Please don't tell anybody what I've just told you. If they find out I've talked, I'm finished,' Mansutti begged.

I lit a cigarette. ‘Well, we'll have to tell someone about it, but we won't mention your name. You just take it easy, keep a low profile and everything will work out fine.'

We stood up. Before leaving the booth, Rossini turned again to Mansutti, looked him in the eye and hissed, ‘Don't ever again show me disrespect.'

 

Max was waiting for us in his study. He listened carefully to the story Mansutti had told us.

‘Let me get this straight. Mansutti is saying that two Colombians had themselves arrested just to get into prison so they could poison a mule. It doesn't add up. Arías Cuevas was small fry. Why put two killers to such trouble? Anyway, if they really were caught red-handed it would be in the papers somewhere.' Max got up and started to thumb through recent copies of
Nuova Venezia
. ‘Here it is!' he exclaimed after a couple of minutes, waving a page from the paper at us.

 

GANG OF SOUTH AMERICANS ARRESTED
AT DEPARTMENT STORE

 

A professional gang of foreign thieves was arrested yesterday at a department store in Mestre. Pretending not to understand any Italian, they took advantage of the confusion they had created to hide the stolen goods. They are to be tried on a fast-track procedure and deported from Italy, in line with the government's new strategy for combatting foreign racketeers.

 

Beneath the story the paper carried the mugshots of Alacrán, Jaramillo and their girlfriends.

Max looked at me. ‘You need to ask your Paris contact for some information on this. We've got to understand what's going on.'

‘You're right.' I looked at my watch. It was just after four in the morning. Too bad. I'd have to wake up Alessio Sperlinga.

‘Ciliegia, it's me.'

‘For fuck's sake, Alligator. I was fast asleep.'

‘Did you get anything?'

‘Yeah, I did. I got some photos for you. I was going to send them yesterday but I didn't have the time.'

‘Can you do it now?'

‘Is it really that urgent?'

‘If it wasn't, I wouldn't have woken you up.'

An hour later a page of notes and a couple of photos arrived at Fat Max's email address. He printed everything out and we immediately compared the pictures he had received with the ones in the newspaper. The newspaper mugshot of ‘Alberto Jumenez Jamba' matched that of Aurelio Uribe Barragán, aka Alacrán. The notes that Ciliegia's Colombian friends had supplied identified this Alacrán as a hit man belonging to the syndicate run by Rosa Gonzales Cuevas, aka La Tía, a former member of the Medellin cartel currently active in Bogotá. Guillermo Arías Cuevas had been her nephew, but was described as a hanger-on of no importance. Alacrán, on the other hand, was described as a highly dangerous killer. He was believed to have served in the Colombian special forces and to have been sentenced to death by the Colombian guerrillas to avenge the numerous political militants and campesinos he had murdered.

The other photograph matched none of those published in
Nuova Venezia
. It portrayed La Tía in the arms of a young woman.

Old Rossini poured himself a vodka. ‘Things are suddenly a lot clearer. Auntie Rosa has had her nephew whacked because she knew he was a piece of trash and might squeal.'

‘You have to hand it to them, they've been both cunning and skillful,' Max commented. ‘Without running much risk—admittedly with a fair amount of luck on their side—they managed to get close enough to the mule to poison him and then get themselves flown back home courtesy of the Italian police.'

I looked at the photo of the gang leader. ‘The problem is, what do we do now? As far as the murder of the mule is concerned, with the information in our possession, Bonotto could probably put Corradi in the clear. But, as for the trafficking charges, we're back where we started. The way things are looking, Corradi will die in jail.'

Rossini yawned. ‘We're just going to have to start sifting through everyone on the scene who deals Colombian coke until we lay our hands on the mule's Italian offloader. We've no other option.'

We all agreed. ‘We'll make a start this evening,' Rossini added, as he went out the door.

 

I slept for a couple of hours, then got up and jumped under the shower. While shaving, I observed my face in the mirror. I didn't like what I saw. I was ageing. I opened the bathroom cabinet and took down a jar of face cream that Virna had given me for Christmas. She must have bought it in some kind of health-food store. It was aimed at men and claimed to have a ‘day-and-night anti-wrinkle effect'. I smeared some on my face, massaging gently, as recommended in the instructions. Then I got dressed.

There was a time when I used to dress like a blues singer from Louisiana: garish shirts made of raw silk, blue jeans, and python or alligator boots. Unfortunately, this made me too conspicuous and the cops got me in their sights. In the end I was forced to change my look. I now wore corduroy suits, sea-blue shirts and glove-leather shoes. Virna was in charge of my wardrobe. Every now and then she would drag me along to a store and choose my clothes.

I stepped out of my flat cursing the icy weather and got into my Skoda. Twenty minutes later I parked outside Bonotto's law office. The secretary told him I was waiting to see him and he came out to greet me. His office was tastefully furnished with antique furniture and the walls were decorated with old prints. I told him what we had found out.

‘Is your source reliable?' he asked.

‘Completely. He's a prison officer at Santa Maria Maggiore. I'm confident that events unfolded precisely as I have described. Unfortunately, I can't give you his name. I'm sure you can imagine the reasons why.'

‘Of course, Buratti, of course. I'll go to Venice later this morning and have a word with the prison governor and his deputy. I'm sure we can find a way of safeguarding their careers, while obviating the need for my client to stand trial.'

I lit a cigarette. ‘This evening we're going to start making some enquiries among drug dealers, checking out those who sell Colombian cocaine. We want to see if we can identify the mule's Italian contact. It's something of a long shot, but right now we have no other leads. Actually, that's not altogether true. There is one other lead I haven't yet mentioned to you. We thought it best to rule it out right from the outset given that it involves both the police and the Guardia di Finanza.'

The lawyer knit his brows. Before he had time to take offence, I related to him everything that the owner of the Pen­sione Zodiaco had told us.

‘Do you think he could be useful to us if we put him on the stand and cross-examined him?'

I shook my head. ‘He doesn't pay his taxes and is terrified of a visit from the Finanza. He'll say whatever the cops want him to say. I'm afraid you can put him down as a hostile witness.'