At the End of a Dull Day (12 page)

It felt strange to hold a gun in my hand again after so many years. I'd been certain that guns were alien to me now, but instead my hands had performed the movements correctly and I'd felt the surge of power of my finger on the trigger.

Dulce cried out and I heard the unmistakable sound of a slap. Lin broke free of the Maltese gangster's embrace and threw her arms around my neck, begging me to take her back “home.” I pushed her off me with a single hard shove. Petrus burst into laughter and I reminded him that he still owed me money.

He pulled a wad of 500-euro bills out of his jeans pocket and started counting them, after licking the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

 

I had passed Brescia and I was about to leave Lombardy and enter the Veneto when my cell phone rang.

“Should I be worried?” Tortorelli asked in a bored voice.

“Not at all,” I replied with perfect calm. “I'm just shutting down my side business activities, like you asked me to do.”

“When will you honor us again with your presence?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, no later than that. In any case, the staff is perfectly capable of running La Nena.”

“What would I drink with a plate of frayed dried horse meat with balsamic vinegar and shredded smoked ricotta?”

“A Gewürtztraminer would be perfect. It might not be the most orthodox pairing, but you won't be disappointed.”

“I took the liberty of telling the cook to skip the bed of arugula. I hate that crap . . . ”

“What did the cook do?”

“What I told him. I made him think that it was an order from you.”

“You stay away from my kitchen, Tortorelli.”

“And you stop playing hide and seek, otherwise there'll be big changes when you get back.”

He hung up. Piece of shit. I turned on the radio and turned up the sound to vent my rage. The station was playing a song by Carla Bruni. I caught a line that went: “Someone told me that our lives aren't worth much.”

She seemed to be referring to my life. I reached out my hand and caressed the grip of my Beretta. Getting my hands on a weapon meant nothing more than the fact that I was ready to use it. I had no plan, and the ideas in my head were fuzzy at best. The one thing I did know was that unless I reacted I'd lose everything I owned and wind up buried in a shallow grave. Brianese had sold me to the 'Ndrangheta to punish me and keep me under control. He was afraid of me because I'd refused to play by his rules. I could always cut and run for it, abandoning La Nena, Martina, and the life that I'd worked so hard to build for myself, but that wasn't something I was willing to do. I would have run away by now if it was just a fight between yours truly and the Palamaras. In that case I wouldn't have had a whisper of a chance. But Brianese was in the middle of this fight and the only hunch that kept surfacing in the churning whirl of my thoughts, though I still couldn't pin it down, was that there was still a slender margin for negotiation and I might be able to use it to get back what was once mine. I needed to find some form of leverage that would force Brianese to make a deal with me. After all, this was Italy, and by now even the Mafiosi are to some extent obliged to work within the system. In the Veneto, the local and international Mafias had moved in en masse, attracted by a quantity of wealth and an economic system that seemed to have been custom made for money laundering. No one had to be told how it worked: the way they used cutthroat loan sharking practices to take over companies, leaving the owners in place as their puppets while a guy like Tortorelli laundered dirty money and politicians like Brianese forged the right connections to invest that money in government contracts and real estate speculation.

No, it was clear to me that if I wanted to get the Calabrians off my ass I'd have to get the lawyer and member of parliament who'd been the best man at my wedding into the middle of things and use him as leverage. He thought he was above the fray. He'd made his calculations and thought I was done for. And maybe I was, maybe I was deluding myself with my elaborate plans. But Brianese didn't know how much I'd figured out about his relationship with Ylenia and the role that woman played in his web of dealings.

Ylenia. I rolled the name around in my mouth, bouncing it off tongue and teeth. This could be the launching point for my counteroffensive. It could also be a way of clawing back the two million euros that Brianese owed me.

There was a time in my life when I'd been a member of a terrorist group in Italy and later a guerrilla organization in Central America. Before we carried out an operation of any kind we patiently gathered all the information that could be useful and we took the time to plan out the logistics, the escape routes, the emergency plan B. I was going to do the same thing now. The first thing I needed was someone to help me. I could count on Nicoletta but she wasn't enough. The time had come to meet with Mikhail again.

“In two hundred kilometers I'm going to have to stop for gas,” I said over the cell phone.

“Do you want to see a picture of my pretty cousin?”

“No.”

“Then I'm not sure how interested I am in seeing you.”

“Come on, don't be lazy. I'll treat you to a cup of coffee and we can talk a little about Soviet literature.”

 

“Couldn't you have parked in the shadows?” the Russian complained.

I pointed to a closed-circuit camera mounted on a pole. “They've added a new one.”

He puffed out his cheeks in annoyance. “All right, what do you need this time? Am I going to have to dig another grave in the countryside?”

“I'm in trouble, Mikhail.”

“I'm sorry to hear that but I hope it doesn't involve me in any way.”

I pulled the cash from the sale of my three girls out of my pocket and laid the money down next to the stick shift. He peeled off a five hundred euro note and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“For the trouble of coming out here.”

“I need somebody to shadow an 'Ndrangheta bookkeeper like they were glued to him and report all conceivable information back to me,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth all at once.

“Are you planning to rip off the Calabrian Mafia?”

I shrugged. “That might be an idea, but right now all I want is the information. They're using La Nena to launder dirty money and I want to get them out of there.”

“You're crazy,” he snickered, reaching out for the door handle.

“I'm not done. I'm also looking for someone with nothing to lose, ready for anything, smart, on the ball, pitiless. You know, a desperate fugitive on the run.”

“A renegade.”

“That's right.”

“And we kill him when the job is done.”

“Exactly. And his money would go to you.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Twenty thousand to tail the bookkeeper. Fifty thousand for the renegade.”

I monitored his reaction. The money was clearly not enough. “If it all goes according to plan, I ought be able to lay my hands on another 250,000 euros,” I lied, thinking about the money that Brianese owed me.

“I don't believe you but theorizing about it's as a good a way as any to kill some time,” he said as he lit a cigarette.

“I don't let people smoke in this car.” The words slipped out of my mouth.

“Wait: you're thinking about robbing the 'Ndrangheta and killing somebody who's supposed to trust you blindly, but you bust my balls about smoking in your luxury automobile?”

I gestured for him to forget about it and go on. “I can take care of following the guy myself,” he said. “And maybe I have a vague idea of who your renegade could be . . . and figuring things on the fly, I don't see how I can do it for less than 200,000 euros.”

“You're exorbitant.”

“I've never heard the word in my life. Anyway, I may very well be ‘exorbitant,' but you're up to your neck in shit.”

He had a point. I extended my hand. “You've got a deal.”

He shook it, chuckling. “Just remember that I don't trust you even a little bit and that you're never going to be smart enough to rip me off.”

He grabbed the wad of cash. “This is my advance. Now tell me who I'm supposed to tail.”

 

The waiters and waitresses were all happy to see me. Tortorelli started off on the wrong foot; he hadn't understood that they had a demanding, exhausting job and deserved to be treated with respect. Things were even worse in the kitchen. I listened and reassured. Then I confronted the bookkeeper.

“Everybody hates you. Nice start.”

He carefully watched the ass of a customer as she walked by and I gave him all the time he wanted because that was a piece of interesting information that might help me get a handle on this guy's personality.

“Look, Pellegrini, you're lucky to have me here instead of the Palamaras,” he murmured, barely moving his lips. “I'm just a technician and I like to avoid trouble.”

“Then I don't see why we should have any problems.”

“I take orders from the Calabrians, just like you do, but I outrank you, and hierarchy in this kind of business is the only way of keeping things organized. No one authorized you to do things your way. You're going to have to get it into your fucking head that you have to answer for the things you do and you have ask me permission before you do them. Like the employee that you are.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Yes.”

“All right. It won't happen again, but I want you to quit meddling in the way the place is run.”

“That's a pity, because more than a few changes are needed in the way you're operating here.”

He was trying to provoke a reaction and I ignored him. Unintentionally the bookkeeper had just provided me with a useful piece of information: the way the Calabrians had things planned, he was designated to take my place. Tortorelli was ambitious and thought a lot of himself. That much was clear, but nothing else was. He wasn't even Calabrian. Where the fuck did he fit in?

He made me sit there and answer questions, mostly smart ones, for more than an hour. When he asked me what wine went best with Blue Stilton, I intentionally recommended the worst choice imaginable. Maybe that would teach him to stop busting my balls.

A little before the evening aperitif, Nicoletta came in with the owner of a lingerie shop to quench her thirst with an organic carrot juice. I watched Tortorelli, hoping he might show some interest in her. Not only was he indifferent, he made it clear with a wisecrack that he knew she was in charge of my prostitution ring. Brianese had informed them thoroughly.

At the agreed time, the Russian walked into the restaurant. He drank a spritz and impressed the bookkeeper's features clearly in his memory. A short while later, Martina and Gemma came in too, and I was forced to introduce them to Tortorelli. The 'Ndrangheta bookkeeper was courteous and gallant and he was delighted to be invited to sit at their table. The restaurant was full and I had to take care of my customers. I made a mental note to grill the ladies later.

An hour or so later I noticed Gemma get up to go the restroom. She was changing, in fact she was even walking differently. Hurtling down into the abyss of my darkest desires was the best thing that could have happened to her. It was a pity that I'd have to go home to Martina that night.

When I replaced Tortorelli at the cash register at dinnertime I did my best to find any evidence of money laundering. I was curious to figure out how it worked. But I couldn't detect anything out of the ordinary. I spied on him when it was time to shut down the cash register for the night, too, but to no avail.

“Don't forget: tomorrow morning we have an appointment with your accountant to hand over the management of the books,” he said before leaving for the night. I watched him through the plate glass window as he walked away into the darkness, the daily receipts stuffed into a cheap briefcase. From that night on, he would be responsible for depositing the money in the night depository. He looked like a perfectly harmless beanpole of a man, strolling through the city streets. Downstairs from my apartment I saw Nicoletta sitting in her car and smoking a cigarette. I walked up to the car window.

“Ylenia was furious when she heard that her boss won't have access to the whores anymore and she cancelled all our agreements. So long, commissionership.”

“Oh, they'd never have kept that promise. Brianese talked to the Calabrians about you, too. You're too tangled up with me to be kept around.”

“That bastard!” she hissed, flicking her cigarette butt into the street.

“You can say that loud and clear. And you were his accomplice.”

“Don't start that again, Giorgio.”

“I'll do exactly the fuck what I want, Nicoletta,” I clarified the point for her. “Listen, what do you think about Tortorelli?”

“I don't know. I'd have to get to know him a little better.”

”But he's not going to let you get close enough,” I cut her off brusquely, handing her a sheet of paper with the address of the residential hotel where Brianese and Ylenia had their lovers' trysts. “Find a way to get me in there. The best thing would be to rent an apartment. Use your brother's real estate agency, fuck every tenant in the building, but don't come back empty-handed.”

She clamped another cigarette between her lips. “I put the house up for sale.”

“What for?”

She looked at me as if I'd fallen to earth from some other planet. “I watched a girl being murdered on my couch. Have you already forgotten about that?”

“So now you're not comfortable in the place?”

“I go there strictly to sleep at night.”

“Move in with Gemma.”

She snorted in annoyance. “That girl has some weird ideas in her head. I'd rather not, thanks.”

“That wasn't a suggestion, Nicoletta. I just gave you an order.”