A Pimp's Notes (22 page)

Outside, the sun is shining brashly and the sky, swept clean of clouds by a light breeze that’s sprung up out of the north, is a shade of blue that only spring can paint it. As I walk to my Mini I regret that I’m not in the mood to appreciate it.

Too many things have happened, and all at the same time.

The death of Tulip, the arrival of Carla in my life, the chassis number of my car, Tano Casale with his voice that I know and his counterfeit lottery ticket. And then there are the bundles of newspaper strips that Daytona gave me—I intend to ask him for an explanation the minute I can get my hands on a telephone or wrapped around his neck.

I head back toward Milan, toward home. I need to lie down for a few hours and vegetate with the television turned on, in the shadows. Try to establish a little order in this panorama of chaos. Make a few phone calls, while I wait to hear from the girls.

I retrace the route I followed to get here. When you’re thinking about other things, certain trips really seem short, unless your thoughts are obsessively focused on the destination.

Which isn’t the case right now.

Before long, I’m back in Cesano. At this time of the afternoon there are plenty of empty parking spaces. I get out of my car, walk around the shrill games the kids are playing on the lawn, and let the gazes of a couple of mothers slide off my back and onto the ground.

A few more moments and I lock the world outside my front door, taking with me only the bare necessities to keep at bay the things that are chasing me. The apartment smells of soap and disinfectant and the wooden roller blinds are lowered halfway. Signora Argenti must have come to put the house in order, an order that I sense I’ll soon disrupt.

The minute I walk in the door, I pick up the phone and dial a number, hoping that the person I’m calling is in his office. For once, he answers the phone himself.

“Biondi here. Who’s calling?”

“Ugo, it’s Bravo.”

“I’m busy right now. Tell me quick.”

From his slightly disheveled tone of voice, I’m guessing he’s entertaining one of his special clients, and she may be sitting astride him right now.

“I need permission to get in to see Carmine.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible.”

“This isn’t a very good time to visit prisoners in San Vittore.”

“I can imagine. But I have to see him.”

“Okay. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”

I don’t even have time to say good-bye before the line goes dead.

With the receiver still in my hand, I see in my mind’s eye a man’s face in a prison visiting room, behind glass. Each time his expression is a little deader, a little more defeated. The idea I’m going to suggest to him may rekindle a bit of life in his features.

Then I go back to considering my own position. I’m doing the twist in a minefield. If I make just one false step, there’ll be nothing left of me but shredded flesh.

I hang up the phone very delicately, as if it, too, were mined.

I take the lottery ticket of my dreams out of my inside jacket pocket and toss the jacket onto the couch. I slip off my loafers and walk into my bedroom. I conceal the ticket in my hiding place. Then I turn on the television. The screen flickers to life as I’m stretching out on the bed.

I don’t even get a chance to lay my head on the pillow.

The TV’s turned to RAI One, which is broadcasting a special edition of the national news. The face of news anchor Bruno Vespa is deadpan, his voice is inexorable, while he reads through a news report that Paolo Frajese has just handed him.

“… and now, we have confirmation that the member of parliament for the Christian Democratic Party Mattia Sangiorgi, the younger brother of Senator Amedeo Sangiorgi, is also believed to be one of the victims of the multiple homicide committed at the villa of Lorenzo Bonifaci, who was also found dead. We do not yet know the names of the other victims or any other details concerning this horrible massacre, but early leaks from the investigators seem to indicate that no one in the villa escaped alive, even the security personnel, well-trained and competent men that the financier had hired to ensure the safety of himself and his guests, evidently and unfortunately in vain. Let’s go to our reporter in Lesmo, near Monza, outside the villa where the massacre took place.”

The scene of the news studio is replaced by live images from an exterior camera. The face of the correspondent appears in the foreground, and in the background is a front gate framed by two redbrick columns. A wall, behind which you can see tall trees, extends in both directions, enclosing the grounds of the estate.

The camera shows a squad car parked next to the gate, keeping out the crowd of television and newspaper journalists milling around in search of news.

I don’t even hear the reporter’s words.

Suddenly I find myself breathing heavy air that smells distinctly unhealthy, as if an evil cloud had permeated every square inch of my bedroom. Sitting there faceless and voiceless, I inspect images I can’t see and voices I can’t hear, with only one certainty burned in my mind.

My own time, the time I knew, the time in which I moved, is over forever.

13

The doorbell rings with the roar of an explosion, blowing into a million tiny fragments the moment in which I was hiding. I turn off the television set and get up with the sensation that the legs I’m moving don’t actually belong to me. I walk to the door, confident that when I open it I’ll see Lucio asking me the solution to my latest puzzle attack and offering to make me a cup of coffee.

Instead, the serious face of Stefano Milla appears before me. With him are two uniformed policemen. One has a dog on a leash, a mongrel that must be part German shepherd. The detective has a neutral expression that in this context comes off as highly professional. At this particular moment I don’t have full control of my facial expression. In a few short seconds we’re looking at each other again, but now we’re two different people. I’m the one who opened my apartment door and got a nasty surprise and he’s an officer of the law.

He sticks a hand in his pocket, pulls out a sheet of paper, and hands it to me.

“
Ciao
, Bravo. I’m afraid you’re going to have to let us come in. We have a search warrant.”

I don’t even bother to check the document. I’m sure it’s all according to regulation. He strides briskly ahead through the heavily trampled field of formalities.

“You have the right to request the presence of a lawyer during this search. Do you intend to call someone?”

I shake my head and step aside to let them in. Milla walks past me and the two police officers follow close behind him. They stop in the middle of the living room, looking around, wordlessly surveying the room. The dog is calm, and at the order of its policeman handler it sits on the wall-to-wall carpeting.

“You can help us speed up the process. Do you have a storage facility in the basement or attic?”

“No.”

“Do you have weapons or drugs in the house?”

“No.”

“Do you have a safe?”

I catch myself smiling, disconsolately. I wave one hand eloquently in the air.

“What would I put in a safe?”

I notice that one of the policemen bursts out laughing. He turns away to conceal the fact. Milla doesn’t notice and he addresses his men with all the official pomp that his rank confers upon him.

“All right. Proceed.”

Without a word, the two policemen spring into action and disappear down the hall. One thought in my mind follows them with a certain degree of apprehension. I’m finally going to have a chance to see if my secret hiding place, which I’ve always thought was so clever, will stand up to a thorough police search.

Milla has a doleful expression on his face. How sincere it is I couldn’t say.

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid your apartment’s going to be a bit of a mess when we’re done.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I don’t think you do.”

Resignedly, I go over to the couch and take a seat and wait. Stefano starts rummaging through my dresser drawers. I don’t know what to expect from him. Without a doubt, I have a certain privileged advantage in this situation, because to some extent I know about the skeletons in his closet. Can I make tactical use of that? Actually, I doubt it, since talking about Tano Casale and him would mean talking about Tano Casale and
me
.

Maybe Stefano’s thinking the same thing, because the whole time that he’s working busily between the living room and the tiny kitchen, rummaging and burrowing, our eyes never meet and we never say a word. I believe that the presence of the two police officers in the other rooms is a valid deterrent to any form of communication.

The search seems to last for an eternity. They literally turn the place inside out, pulling out drawers, checking every piece of paper, pulling paintings off the wall, removing the upholstery from the couch, the cases from the cushions and pillows.

In the end, all three of them are standing in the middle of the room. Three men, to say nothing of the dog, as Jerome K. Jerome put it in the title of his novel. Except that this story isn’t particularly funny and the boat is springing leaks all over.

Milla looks at me.

“Everything seems okay here. But we’re not done yet. You’re going to have to come with us.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“If you were, you’d already be on the road with handcuffs on your wrists. They just need some information at headquarters.”

I stand up from the chair I’ve been sitting on since he kicked me off the sofa. I pick up my jacket and grab my shoes.

“Then let’s get going.”

We walk out onto the landing and in a couple of minutes we’re at the bottom of the stairs. There’s nobody outside. I try to count in my mind how many pairs of eyes are probably watching from the windows and how many
I always suspected that he
’s are wafting up toward the ceilings. Suddenly I understand that I don’t give a damn after all. It’s just curiosity piled on curiosity, suppositions added to suppositions.

Outside the gate, a police squad car and a truck from the K9 unit are waiting.

The dog disappears with a leap into the back of the K9 truck and I’m ushered toward the Alfa Romeo patrol car. The officer opens the right-side door for me and Milla goes around and gets in on the other side. Once we’re all aboard, the car pulls out, without the indignity of the siren, leaving behind us that portion of the world of honest folks who’ll never take a trip like the one I’m on.

The car runs through the streets of Milan. Outside there are sounds and noises. Inside there is nothing but silence. Milla and I are seated side by side and we absorb the jolts of the asphalt without looking at each other. Each of us would pay a considerable sum of money to know the other one’s thoughts. Each of us would lie if we were asked what we were thinking.

The trip ends at the police station on Via Fatebenefratelli. We drive through the front gate and park in the middle of the courtyard. We get out and walk to a staircase straight ahead of us. Two flights of beat-up old stone stairs and a wall of flaking plaster, then a corridor that echoes our footsteps. Finally, a wooden door.

Milla knocks, and when he hears from the other side of the door the magic word that authorizes him to do so, he turns the handle and creates a void where there once was a door. I walk into an office that smacks of police even if you just suddenly found yourself there, without going through the front door. It’s the mismatched furniture and the paper on the desk and the halfhearted paintings on the walls. But especially the faces of the two men sitting in the room. One guy, around thirty, with a dark, mature face, long hair, and a scraggly beard, is sitting in a chair with armrests, in the left-hand corner. He’s dressed in an ordinary manner, which in the street might even help him blend in. In this room, he looks like a plainclothes officer or a member of the intelligence services—you could spot him from a plane.

Milla addresses the man sitting behind the desk.

“
Buon giorno
, Mr. Chief Inspector. This is the person in question. As for the other matter, negative.”

“Fine. You can go.”

While the detective leaves the room, the chief inspector points me to a chair across from him.

“Take a seat.”

I comply with his command and we sit facing each other. The chief inspector is older than the other man in the room and is dressed much more formally, with a light blue shirt, a gray three-piece suit, and a tie that should trigger an automatic warrant for his arrest. His hair is short and chestnut brown, his face is lean, and his gaze is enigmatic behind the lenses of his glasses.

I look at him and wait.

“I’m Chief Inspector Vincenzo Giovannone, just to introduce myself.”

He says nothing about the other guy, the pale man sitting wordless in his chair. A man with no identity or position. In my mind he immediately becomes the Nameless One.

The chief inspector opens a file that’s lying in front of him on his desk.

“Are you Francesco Marcona, also known by the nickname Bravo?”

“Yes.”

“I see that you were arrested once for exploitation of prostitution.”

Predictable. The waltz begins the way these dances always do. I follow the steps, though I have the feeling that from a certain point on it’s going to become necessary to improvise.

“Then you must also see that I was released and there wasn’t even an indictment, much less a trial.”

“Right.”

Giovannone finally looks up from the file. He shoots me a direct glance. His eyes are light-colored and sharp. They’re the eyes of a man who knows what he’s doing.

“Do you know three young women named, respectively, Cindy Jameson, Barbara Marrano, and Laura Torchio?”

“Yes.”

“Were you aware of the fact that last night they were in Lorenzo Bonifaci’s villa, in Lesmo, outside of Monza?”

I have a strong presentiment that sweeps over my head and stomach at the same time. The unpleasant sensation of falling that I sometimes get in dreams takes hold of me. There’s something grotesque and wrong about this list of names. I took Carla to Piazza San Babila myself. True, I didn’t wait around to make sure that Bonifaci’s car and driver showed up to get the girls and take them to their appointment, but the presence of Cindy and Barbara in that horrible place ought to mean that she had been there too.