At the End of a Dull Day (11 page)

At the end of a dull spring day, Brianese walked into La Nena with his usual brisk determined step, his usual bright smile stamped firmly on his face. He was jovial and pleasant with everyone and ran through a well-rehearsed routine of wisecracks and personal stories about the Padanos and their mutual adversaries on the center-left.

My stomach did a flip-flop and I only went over to pay my tributes once he'd finished performing his little skit.

“Welcome back, Counselor.”

He pretended he'd only just noticed me. “Caro Giorgio, how have you been?” he asked in a loud voice, shaking my hand in delight. “Forgive me if I haven't been around for a while, but here in the Veneto, instead of progressing we're going backwards and no one has time to see their old friends anymore.”

Then he locked arms with me and lowered his voice. “Is the back room still ‘usable'?”

I smiled with satisfaction. “I never opened it to the public and I've made sure it's nice and clean.”

“Perfect. I'm expecting three major enterpreneurs in the food and hospitality industry that I'd like you to meet. I hope you can join us.”

“It'll be a pleasure, Counselor.”

It became obvious that it would be no pleasure at all the minute I saw them walk into the place. I had no doubt whatsoever that these were Brianese's guests. In all these years, I'd developed a considerable body of experience in terms of the corrupt and the corruptible, profiteers, politicos, businessmen, developers, industrialists, and people who fit into none of those categories. It was clear why the Counselor had chosen not to wait for them at the counter, preferring to go into the back room and loiter there. He didn't want anyone to remember having seen him together with them. I sized them up as they headed straight for the counter. The first one in line had to be the boss, or at least that's what I presumed from the Armani suit. He was about fifty-five years old, roughly five foot six inches in height, with a slight build, salt-and-pepper hair brushed straight back, a square face, a thin nose, and dark eyes set slightly too close together.

The second one was tall and skinny as a reed. His suit was tailor-made but the fabric wasn't exceptionally good. A face out of the Eighties, his hair was a little long over his collar, and he was probably ten years younger than the first guy. He looked like a fugitive from a Spandau Ballet concert.

The guy bringing up the rear was all eyes, looking around and savoring every detail as if it all belonged to him. He was the youngest, the most arrogant, and probably the stupidest of the three. He bore a vague physical resemblance to the first guy, and he wore expensive casual attire that showed off the time he spent in the gym.

I'd seen people like them before, in the exercise yard at San Vittore prison. They always moved in a pack and they considered themselves the masters of the world.

They headed straight for me. “Counselor Brianese,” said the boss.

They knew exactly who I was and they'd treated me as if I was a servant. A bad harbinger. I slowly extended my index finger and pointed to the door of the back room. “He's expecting you,” I said in the same tone of voice.

I waved over a waitress. Her name was Agata and she was a reliable and likeable employee. Even more important, she was La Nena's corporate memory. She had an unusually accurate photographic memory and was a living archive of every customer that had ever been through the place.

“Have you ever seen them before?”

“The tall one,” she answered confidently. “He's been here three or four times recently. By himself.”

I pulled a bottle of prosecco out of the fridge and went to find out what a fucked-up trio of Mafiosi accompanied by Brianese was doing in my restaurant.

The Counselor was entertaining them by singing the praises of another parliamentarian whose name I hadn't managed to catch. I poured the wine and waited in silence.

“This is Giorgio Pellegrini, the proprietor.” He moved on to introductions once he decided that it was time to talk business.

That's when I found out that the boss was named Giuseppe Palamara, the young guy was Nilo Palamara, Giuseppe's nephew. The beanpole was given short shrift: Bookkeeper Tortorelli.

“These gentlemen have come to meet you because they need to move some fairly substantial sums of money through your restaurant for a while.”

A flash of light filled my mind. “Money laundering. They want to turn La Nena into a washing machine.”

“Well, my work here is done,” the Counselor announced, as he got to his feet. “Now the four of you will certainly have some details to work out that won't require my presence.”

None of the others moved a muscle. Everything was proceeding according to script. I waited until Brianese was at the door and then I caught up with him.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“I'm teaching you what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you.”

I was too shocked to think of anything to say. “If those guys get their foot in the door, I'll never get them out of here. They'll take La Nena away from me.”

“That'll never happen,” he replied. “As I've already told you, you're sick and dangerous, a loose cannon in a system that has very different rules. They'll keep you on a short leash but they'll let you stay where you are.”

He could read the rage and hatred in my eyes and a smile played on his lips. He put one hand on my shoulder. “Giorgio, you can't imagine how happy I am right now.”

He gripped the handle and opened the door. He hadn't even closed it and he was already greeting someone else. I was just one more problem to him, and I'd been taken care of.

“Come here, Pellegrini,” Giuseppe Palamara ordered, accentuating his Calabrian accent.

I turned around and went back to my seat. I filled my glass and drank it off in a single gulp.

“We've asked around about you, and we know all about your time in prison. We know you're an informer, a real piece of shit, and that all you're good for is punching some poor woman in the face who's trying to earn a living,” Giuseppe said. “But we also know that you're not so stupid that you can't understand who we are and how far we're willing to go.”

I looked at the bottle on the table in front of me. It seemed to have been designed especially to smash into the faces of those bastards. But my hands lay flat on the table, and I heard my voice uttering the words of a slave.

“I know how to stay in my place.”

“Good. This is how it's going to work,” the boss began explaining. “You can stay in charge of the restaurant, but from now on you're on a salary, and the bookkeeper is going to take care of accounting.”

“We'll give you three thousand a month,” young Nilo specified.

“Thirty-six thousand a year. It's not bad and you don't have much of a say in the matter.”

He rang the tines of a fork against the crystal wine glass to catch my attention. “Understood, Pellegrini? Don't do anything to bring the cops around. No more whores or any of that bullshit. You need to work all day and then go home.”

“Understood, Pellegrini?” Giuseppe said again.

“Understood,” I replied. “And I assure you that you're really just doing me a favor. This place is just a money pit. I was using all the money I was earning on the girls to pay off the losses here.”

Giuseppe Palamara snickered. “Now the bookkeeper will take care of straightening out the books. He's a good accountant and a hard worker. Starting tomorrow morning he's going to sit at that cash register and he's not going to lift his ass out of that chair until the place closes at night.”

“That's fine. I'll be able to focus on running this place the way it deserves.”

“Good boy,” he mocked me. “Now bring us something to eat.”

“You still haven't told me how long you plan to use my restaurant.”

The Palamaras exchanged an ironic glance. “As long as it takes,” Giuseppe answered.

That is to say, forever. After a while they'd persuade me to sell the place, and then they'd probably kill me, as an unasked-for favor to the Counselor. I didn't have any idea what his relationship might be with these Calabrians, but I doubted that he really understood who he was dealing with.

“I'd like to sample the Istrian Malvasia,” said Bookkeeper Tortorelli, speaking up for the first time. Up until that moment he'd studied the wine list as if he didn't care about the little lecture the Palamaras were delivering. “You think it would go well with a bowl of
bigoli in salsa
?”

“Personally, it strikes me as a stretch,” I replied in a professional tone of voice. “I'd actually recommend a pinot grigio del Collio.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

I walked out of the back room and stopped Piero, the senior waiter.

“Go take the order from the table in the back room. You're in charge of the restaurant. I have some things to do.”

I headed home. I walked briskly, my long steps propelling me down the sidewalk. Martina wasn't there. She was at the gym, attending her Zumba Fitness class. I stripped, putting my clothes away carefully. I dropped into the oxblood red armchair and sat there staring at the spinner bike for a long time—I couldn't say how long. Then my woman got home, said not a word, took off her clothes, climbed onto the bike, and started pedaling. The whisking sound of the roller had a pharmaceutical effect on me, gradually calming all my rage and grief.

The sun was setting when I emerged from the bedroom carrying Martina in my arms. I set her down in the bathtub, turned on the faucet, and planted a kiss on her forehead.

“Thank you, my love. I'll be home as soon as I can.”

At the restaurant, there wasn't a trace of the Mafiosi. I warned the staff that starting tomorrow there would be an accountant manning the cash register. Nobody blinked an eye. Nobody would have blinked an eye if I'd told them that La Nena was going to launder dirty money for the Calabrians. These were times when holding onto your job was the only thing that mattered. Everything else was a secondary detail.

I spent the night with Nicoletta. I was implacable, pitiless, and I extracted all the information, down to the tiniest details, that she had gathered over time about the clients who patronized my whores in Brianese's network. But it was a waste of time. I was unable to find anything useful that would improve my understanding of the links between the Counselor and the Palamaras.

“Tell the girls to get ready.”

“Are we getting rid of them?” Nicoletta asked hopefully.

“Yes. But I'm going to keep the money,” I replied.

She said nothing in reply. She had too much to make up for. And now that we had Mafiosi involved she was willing to do anything I told her, just to get out alive from the nightmare that had begun with Isabel's death. She hadn't figured out yet that I'd never let her go.

 

The warehouse that served as the Maltese gangsters' headquarters was even filthier than usual. The only thing that glittered in the place was the paint job on the body of my Phaeton.

“Only three this time?” Petrus Zerafa, the boss of the gang, asked me as he massaged the Chinese girl's ass. Lin was looking around in bewilderment. The other two girls were safe in the car. He'd only needed to take a quick look through the window to decide that they were more than acceptable. Lin had struck him as a little skinny and so he'd demanded that she get out so he could inspect the merchandise.

“A Russian guy fell in love and bought one of them,” I replied. “It was true love. She wasn't even the prettiest one, but he wouldn't take no for an answer.”

“That's not the agreement we had,” he protested. “It'll cost you 10 percent.”

I expected it. “All right. But you have to throw a handgun with a silencer into the bargain.”

He gave me a look. “You don't seem like the type. Are you having problems?”

I did a De Niro imitation. “Do I strike you as someone who has problems?”

He wasn't a stupid guy. “You show up down one whore and then you ask me to give you a weapon. Maybe something happened and you have to take care of it.”

“Do you want to stick your nose into my business or do you want to make a deal?”

He nodded. “I can get you one right away but I don't know how clean it is.”

Which meant the gun had been fired and that the police could conceivably link it to a crime. Paradoxically that came in handy, even though it meant I was running the risk of going to jail for something I hadn't even done.

“That's not a problem. All I want is a gun that works, with an extra clip and bullets.”

“Lots and lots of ammunition for a guy who doesn't want to kill anyone . . . ” he muttered ironically. He gestured to one of his thugs to take care of it and the guy vanished down a tunnel between the mountains of boxes.

Petrus kissed Lin's neck and I understood that the time had come to get rid of the girls. I opened the car door. “Get out.”

Dulce and Violeta held hands and sat motionless, pale, and frightened. I stuck my head into the car. “Do whatever they want and it won't go too badly,” I advised in a fatherly tone of voice.

Three guys emerged out of nowhere to take delivery of them while Lin remained wrapped in the boss's arms. He'd made his selection.

The guy that had gone to get the pistol came back. He handed me a flat cardboard box that had once held a clock radio. Inside I found a Beretta pistol, thirty years old but well maintained. The ammunition was new, and made by a trusted manufacturer. The silencer was handmade out of a bicycle pump. Zerafa invited me to test it out by shooting into a pile of old tires.

I slipped in the clip and fired three shots in quick succession. The last shot was louder than the others. That meant the silencer filled up fast with smoke. If I had to use it, I'd need to take care to limit my volume of fire.