The Goodbye Kiss (6 page)

    The
armored truck punctually entered the parking lot. It was 8:30
p.m.
The
guards waited a couple minutes before opening the doors, making sure nothing
suspicious was happening in the area. Only two of them got out, the driver and
the guy who rode shotgun. The third stayed locked in the back, keeping them
covered. He could shoot through the gun holes if it came to that. The two
guards opened the box, took out the bags and got back into the truck in less
than a minute. It would've been impossible to ease up, disarm them, keep an eye
on the third guard and get away with the cash. The only solution was to
eliminate them. I looked around and spotted a four-storey house with a terrace
on the roof. About a hundred meters away, as the crow flies. I reached the gate
and waited for somebody to show up. A woman arrived with two children. Right
then I leaped out of the shadow, holding a couple shopping bags. My looks,
suit, shit-eating grin, shopping all reassured her. She let me inside. I
slipped up the stairs and reached the roof. Just as I expected, the terrace had
a perfect view of the night safe. Two men armed with precision rifles could
pick off the two guards the moment they got out of the truck. The third guard
would stay trapped in the back; some shots fired at the holes would be enough
to hold him off. A parked car would suddenly pull out, reach the two bodies and
grab the money bags. Estimated time: one minute. I smoked another cigarette as
I calculated the number of men needed for the heist. Apart from me, Ciccio and
the inside guy, we'd need two crack shots on the roof and three people in the
car. Eight in all. The guard and Ciccio wouldn't get a cent, so that left six
cuts. Each roughly eighty-five to a hundred and twenty-five thousand. Too
little to risk winding up back in jail. The players would have to be thinned
out.

    I got
back to my car and headed towards Varese where Ciccio was waiting for me in a
sandwich shop.

    "So
what's it look like?" he asked, a quaver in his voice.

    I
took a long sip of an ice-cold beer. "It'll take time to organize a hit of
this size. I need to plan the operation, locate weapons, cars, hideouts, and
especially the right people."

    "When
do you think we can do it?"

    "Not
before October." I aimed my finger in his face. "I'll do this job on
one condition: I call the shots, and from here on out you do only what I tell
you to do and nothing else."

    "OK.
No problem."

    "You
keep in touch with the inside guy. And that's it. Don't you dare take any
initiatives on your own."

    "Hey,
pal," he shot back, offended. "This hit is my idea. Don't forget: if
you get rich, you'll owe it to nobody else but me!"

    I
stared at him. He was a fool. "Sorry, you've got a point there. We just
need to get clear from the beginning. Neither of us intends to go back to
jail-right?" "Right."

    I
would've loved to smoke him on the spot. I smiled and gave him a friendly pat
on the back.

    On
the highway I started to think about how to give the slip to the Barese. If I stayed
with him, I'd be his gopher forever. He couldn't care less about fucking up my
life; to him I was just somebody to be used and then thrown away when I
couldn't be used anymore. He was a traitor and a stoolie, and like most of us
he kept to the crooked path. He had his hands in all sorts of traffic, but his
blind spot was cocaine dealing. The cops in the district anti-mafia squad that
kept tabs on him could overlook many things, from prostitution to loansharking,
but drugs made them mad as hell, and they pulled out the handcuffs. Fact is,
when it came to coke, the Barese was pretty cagey. It took me a while to find
out who was supplying him. Like all hoods, he couldn't stop himself from
boasting in front of the sluts he was screwing. There was a Venezuelan dancer
who snorted like a vacuum cleaner: he'd promised her a stash, telling her to be
patient, it'd show up in a couple days. She asked me if I could get her a taste
in the meantime, tipping me off about the arrival of the shit.

    On
the day of the score I tailed the Barese. In the middle of the afternoon he met
some olive-skinned stranger in the men's- wear section of a department store in
Treviso. Using the old excuse of trying on some trousers, they both went into
the same dressing room, one after the other. The courier left an elegant
briefcase which my employer then picked up. The stranger went back inside to
try on another pair of trousers and grabbed the cash the Barese left there. I
followed the dealer to a parking lot. Took down his license number. Before
going to work I indulged in a meal at a top-drawer restaurant to celebrate. The
Barese now frightened me less.

    I had
two ways of quitting my job at the club. Sell the owner to the
Sacra Corona
Unita,
who had long wanted to settle the score with the Barese for sending
a boss from Taranto to jail. Or sell him to the bulls. I carefully weighed the
pros and cons. I definitely couldn't make a mistake. The Pugliese mafia
would've butchered him like a goat or filled him with lead, eliminating the
problem at the root. But it wasn't at all clear they wouldn't also eliminate
yours truly, who might one day turn into an inconvenient witness. To my
thinking, the cops were less dangerous, but more complicated. The problem was
which cop to trust: just like hoods, they'd use you, then throw you away. The
police and the carabinieri did it because they despised you, not because they
gained anything by it. With their starvation salaries, the risks and the
ulcers, they saw the world divided into citizens to be protected and scum to be
tossed into jail. They loathed the scum, spit in their faces, kicked them in
the balls. But I did feel I could trust one cop: Anedda. Something about him
always made me think he was rotten. Not just corrupt. Rotten. The right sort of
guy to form a partnership with. By offering him the Barese on a silver platter
I'd whet his appetite. The rest I'd propose to him later. I switched the turn
signal to exit into a service area. A piss, a coffee and a phone call. Exactly
in that order.

    Ferruccio
Anedda was truly elegant. Not only did he have good taste, but he wore his
clothes naturally, without any put-on. Like a real gentleman. He'd driven three
hundred kilometers and his cream-colored linen suit wasn't even creased. I cut
to the chase, and he listened to me closely. When I finished, he lit the
cigarette he'd been turning around between his thumb and index finger. He
pocketed the slip of paper with the dealer's license number. Only then did he
decide to say something: "Bravo, Giorgio Pellegrini, attaboy. You want to
fuck over the Barese, and you want me to let you pinch the dough from the
coke."

    "That
we'll split fifty-fifty," I corrected him. The words escaped my mouth in a
tone that was too sharp. It was the fear I might be mistaken about what he was.
"Fame and money," I added, trying to mask the tension. "Two good
reasons for accepting my proposal."

    Anedda
was too much of an old hand to have overlooked these details. He played with my
fear, looking me straight in the eye. "Seventy-thirty. Who do you think
you are, asking for half?"

    I
spread my arms. "I beg your pardon."

    We
were in a country lane on the outskirts of the town.

    Despite
the darkness and the lowered windows, the bull's car was hot. As if the sheet
metal was giving off the heat it had absorbed during the day. My shirt was
glued to my back. I hated sweating. He looked as if he'd just stepped out of
the shower.

    "So
we wait for the Barese outside the department store and nab him with the cocaine."
He began to go over everything again. "In the meantime you intercept the
courier in the dressing room, knock him upside the head and grab the cash. This
is your plan, right?" "Right."

    "Not
bad. It saves us a lot of trouble. Are you sure the exchange always happens in
the same place? "

    I
didn't answer. I looked at the tips of my shoes. I hadn't really thought about
this possibility. I felt as if I'd gone back in time to the moment when I
hadn't verified the night watchman's schedule and that shithead blew himself
up.

    "I
ask you," continued Anedda in a tone as cold as blue steel, "because
I wouldn't want to move a squad from Milano, inventing a mountain of bullshit
to justify the urgency and the absence of communication with colleagues in Treviso,
only to have the whole thing fizzle out. Make a fool of myself. And take a lot
of heat. The kind that cuts short your career. Because in that case I'll fuck
you, Pellegrini. You can bet on it."

    I
knew I could. I had to make a quick decision. Cancel the job or guarantee there
wouldn't be any surprises. I decided to take the risk. Otherwise the hit at the
superstore would be no more than a missed opportunity, and as old as I was I
couldn't allow myself any regrets. I could only take the risk. Besides, from a
purely statistical point of view, it was unlikely I'd be handed the same tough
luck twice in a row.

    "Don't
get worked up, Anedda," I said. "I'll get you that fame and money.
For you it'll be just another job."

    At
the club the coke supply seemed to be never-ending. I followed the traffic
through a few customers who couldn't get enough. They owed me favors. The
stress was killing me. A woman would've been just the ticket. A woman like
Flora. But I'd have to wait. There are times when it's best to be on your own.

    The
Barese had no partners. He couldn't have. And after he fell into Anedda's
hands, he'd have to say adios to Blue Skies as well as his freedom. His friends
in the anti-mafia squad couldn't do fuck all for him. The Milanese bull would
cover his ass with a dynamite press conference. Newspapers, radio, TV. He and
his men lined up behind a table where the coke would be on eye-popping display.
I told Anedda nothing interesting was happening at the club. Dancers and a
couple gorillas. But as I was telling him I got an idea. Two, in fact. The
first gave me the chance to settle up with the Romanians. When it rained, the
arm they broke was sore as hell, reminding me of the humiliation I suffered. I
told Anedda they blabbed to me about killing the Albanian at the farmhouse. The
Digos officer in him pricked up his ears.

    "I
was just asking myself what I could give my colleagues in the area to bite the
bullet and ease the pain of not getting the coke bust. Solving a homicide is
always good publicity, even if the case is no big deal. Do you have any
information that can nail them?"

    I
smiled. "They got rid of the clubs and hammers by tossing them in a
ditch."

    "And
you just happen to know the place."

    I
smiled again.

    The
second idea concerned the assets of the club, namely the dancers. Blue Skies
would be confiscated, and they'd find themselves out of work. A real shame. I
could make some easy cash by selling a few to the Kosovar gangs who buzzed
around the northeast in search of professional dancers for clubs in Pristina.
The glorious war of liberation had ended a while ago, but the K-4 troops, the
peace-keeping force, still hadn't left. And like all soldiers they wanted to be
entertained and get their rocks off. So from one day to the next the Kosovar
mafia, a direct offshoot of their Albanian counterparts, opened clubs of every
kind. Lap dancing raked in the most cash, but it wasn't easy to find
professional dancers. The major obstacle was the girls themselves, who on no
account wanted to wind up in the Albanians' hands. I could close the deal by
taking advantage of the confusion caused by the Barese's arrest. I couldn't
unload all the girls, but five or six would be an acceptable number. I'd have
to keep Anedda in the dark, I'd be taking a big risk, but the dolls would net
me at least thirty thousand. I dropped by a club where the Kosovar boss hung
out. He was bragging to some Italian laborers about being a hero in the Kosovo
Liberation Army, an exterminator of Serbs. I pretended to listen respectfully,
then offered him the deal. He accepted the figure without much haggling, said
he'd send somebody to pick the girls. He was so polite I decided to show up
armed when we settled.

    Days
passed, the stock of cocaine dwindled, and the date of my release from the
Barese was getting closer. I knew the time had come to locate a hideout that
was safe and secret. The cops shouldn't find me in the club. Very soon, in any
case, they'd want to have a chat with me too. Until Anedda explained my situation
to his colleagues, it'd be beneficial to make myself scarce. I knew only one
way to locate a safe place. I started to pore over the ads in the Lombard
newspapers, avoiding Bergamo and focusing on the Varese area. I wanted to find
somewhere that wasn't too far from the scene of the rip-off. But as soon as I
learned the Barese would meet with his supplier in ten or so days, I gave up
this part of the plan and fell back on an old acquaintance: the gangster's
widow. She owned a place in Milano, a detail she spilled to me when she still
didn't get the kind of guy I was. I went knocking on the door of the room she'd
taken in a Udine hotel. She was entertaining a sixty-some- thing. When he
spotted me, he knew he'd better get dressed and disappear. But she didn't put
on a stitch. She looked for a cigarette on the nightstand and sat on the edge
of the unmade bed. "What do you want?" she asked, running a hand
through her hair.