A Pimp's Notes (26 page)

The words of Chief Inspector Giovannone surface in my mind.

You haven’t the faintest idea of the tornado that this latest twist has unleashed …

Oh, I have a very clear idea. A politician of Aldo Moro’s stature, held captive by the Red Brigades; another one of equal prominence lying dead on a slab in the morgue, slain by persons unknown. Add to that the strain of ongoing terrorism trials and the chilly veil of fear that touches everyone and everything.

Right now, every police and Carabinieri officer in Italy must be on high alert, along with all the operatives of the DIGOS intelligence service and the other intelligence agencies, as well as who knows who else. In the various ministries, all the most important politicians in the country must be tearing their hair out, wondering what the hell is happening in the Bel Paese, sending their men—and there are never enough of them—from one point to another on the map, like tin soldiers in a war game.

I see the proprietor emerging from the kitchen with the dish of wontons that I ordered, which he sets down at my table. I go back, sit down, and eat in silence, and the burning sensation in my groin increases instead of diminishing. I force myself to finish my food, hoping fuel will produce energy.

I look at my watch. Maybe Milla has already found the information I need. In any case I no longer have the patience to sit here, waiting, doing nothing, the victim of events, with the growing impression that I’m not the master of my own existence.

I pay the check, leave the restaurant, and go back to the phone booth near where my car is parked. I drop a token into the slot and I dial my home number. I listen to my own voice announce my absence and ask me to leave a message for myself. I wait for the message to end and I pronounce the sequence of sounds that activates the remote control.

After a few clicks and hisses, the answering machine plays back the entire sequence of messages. A couple of phone calls from clients who have no idea how much trouble they could get in just for leaving a message on that strip of tape. Sandra, one of my girls, asking me to call her. A phone call from someone who hung up without leaving a message. My phone conversation with no one from the house of Signora Crippa, Teresa. Then, last of all, the voice of Stefano Milla, who provides me, without any further comment, the address I’m looking for.

As soon as I get back in the car I make a note of it, even though I’m sure I would never forget it. I pull out into traffic, thinking to myself that it’s going to be a long drive to San Donato Milanese. The burning sensation, in the meantime, has become a red-hot wire that someone has twisted around my groin and through my stomach.

15

My small dark blue car is racing down the road at the top legal speed, heading in the direction of the metropolis that everyone knows as San Donato Milanese, an outlying development that in the past two years has risen to the rank of a full-fledged township. A satellite city, with everything that this term implies. It’s a strange place, an ENI company town, where a considerable number of the inhabitants work for that large, state-owned oil company. Two structures in one. One half industrial plants and office buildings, the other half a bedroom community, equipped with all the services that a settlement of that kind demands and requires. A classic instance of hardworking Lombard enterprise, which I will never entirely be able to wrap my head around.

As I drive, my mind continues to wander through the twisting labyrinth that someone has decided to force me to explore. The characters that crowd into this story—whose beginning I can’t understand and whose end is nowhere in sight—are all sitting in the car with me.

Tano Casale, with his familiar voice, who’s waiting to collect his winnings on a counterfeit lottery ticket so that he can double his money thanks to my brilliant idea. Laura, who should have have been a happy, free woman with a cabaret artist boyfriend but who wound up dying in a place she was never supposed to be. Carla, who was supposed to be there instead, and who has now vanished into thin air like a ghost after pretending to be something and someone she never was, possibly under a name that was never hers. Daytona, who did everything he could to make sure I met her and then, after all hell broke loose, took to his heels. And last of all me, a member of that category of the stupid or the innocent who wander through stories like this one without the protection of an alibi.

I can feel the fever chills racking my body. The pain has stabilized at a tolerable level, but it’s no fun to live with. I leave the beltway and turn onto Via Rogoredo. I continue on for a while, passing the various factories that have sprung up over time like warts on what was once farm country. I keep driving until I find a place where I can pull over and park the Mini.

I pop another tablet and pore over the street map of Milan and surrounding territory that I always carry with me in my car, looking for the address that Milla found for me. The house where the phone company installed the phone that Daytona’s mother called is number 106 of Via dei Naviganti Italiani, and the service is in the name of a certain Aldo Termignoni. A name that’s new to me. But with all the connections and business dealings my friend is constantly juggling, it would be hard to keep up with all the people he knows and sees.

It’s stop-and-go driving for a while, as I pull over frequently to double-check my route on the map. I leave the city and the directions steer me farther and farther away, out into genuine countryside. Buildings arranged around a square courtyard, the last outposts against the onslaught of progress and development. As I drive, the roar of low-flying airplanes coming in for a landing at Linate Airport glides over my head and over the houses around me.

At last I turn onto the street I’ve been looking for. There’s a small cluster of houses and a road that continues straight toward a stand of trees in the distance. I check the street number of the last house on my left and discover that that side of the street is odd-numbered. I drive on slowly until I come to other buildings. The street numbers seem to come one by one out of a bingo tumbler cage.

There’s no one in sight. The cars are parked in the courtyards or else along the side of the road, and the people are all inside their houses. A little boy plays alone in a yard. He doesn’t know how that loneliness can grow over the years. Everyday life, everyday words, everyday deeds. An alarm clock rings, a child to take to school, paydays that never seem to come in time, two weeks of vacation every year, polkas in the local dance hall, sex in a car with your girl until you can get married.

Or, if you’re not that lucky, a five-thousand-lira streetwalker on the Via Paullese.

The stabbing pains in my groin and the intermittent shivering both continue. And now I have bouts of nausea to keep them company. I emerge from the trees into what I would call open countryside, if it weren’t for the fact that on the horizon the bastions of yet another industrial plant loom over a field of amber wheat. Maybe this is the kind of dystopian postindustrial place where the Old Man and the Little Boy from the Francesco Guccini song will stroll together one day.

I pull up to an isolated farmhouse that has seen better days and that still, all these years later, carries a whiff of the postwar era. The appearance of the farmhouse is one of general decrepitude; the courtyard looks more like a junkman’s warehouse than part of a working Italian farm. A rusted-out refrigerator is leaning against a tree; the gutted carcass of an automobile stripped of license plates and tires is perched forlornly on four stacks of bricks. A roll-down shutter is jammed to one side so that the window looks like the half-lidded eye of a dog. In the background I catch a glimpse of a low building made of panels of rusted sheet metal nailed to wooden poles driven into the soil.

Weeds sprout up here and there, sowing their intermittent chaos at random, and one side of the house can be reached only by wading through a full-fledged plantation of stinging nettles. Numbers and letters daubed inexpertly with a paintbrush and black paint on one of the two pillars flanking the little entry drive inform me that I’ve reached my destination.

I stop the Mini in the courtyard. Maybe it would have been smarter to drive on, park some distance away, and walk back to the house quietly. But I’m in too much pain and in too much of a hurry.

The door in the front of the house is fastened by a padlock on a chain that runs through two holes drilled through the wood of both panels. On the ground floor, all the wooden blinds are rolled down completely. I skirt the house and reach the back. A walkway of shattered, crumbling concrete runs the entire length of the building. Through the door of the shed in the back, left half open and concealed from the road, I can see the orange tail of Daytona’s Porsche. I proceed up the sidewalk, past windows protected by metal grates, and come to a halt before a wooden door.

The door is ajar.

I shove the door, instinctively apprehensive of the squeak that might follow.

What an idiot I am.

My arrival has been amply announced by the sound of my Mini pulling into the courtyard. I step inside and glance around at the dark, filthy room, to all appearances completely uninhabited. I take a quick look around the ground floor. Nothing but bare, empty rooms, crumpled paper on the floor, a dusty blanket, a stack of chipped dishes in what seems to be a kitchen. Everywhere, the dank smell of dust and saltpeter. I wonder to myself who could live in such a pigsty. And yet someone must, since someone pays the electric and phone bills.

I start up the stairway that runs from the landing just inside the front door and climbs back up to the second floor, a typical architectural feature of these country houses. When I get to the top of the stairs, I find myself in a slightly better kept part of the house, where signs of cleaning and tidiness point to a human presence. A hallway runs the whole length of the house, with the open doors of the bedrooms looking out along the wall like so many gaping mouths.

It looks as if the area to the right has been pretty much neglected, and so I turn left. I go past a room with two cots with bare mattresses on them. A closed door with a pane of frosted glass might be a bathroom. Then there’s another room with a half-open door, through which I can make out a double bed with rumpled sheets.

Finally I step through a door and into the last room on this side of the building.

A quick glance around the room gives me a clear idea of the place. The paint on the walls had been applied in broad, messy stripes with a paint roller; there are some swaybacked armchairs, newspapers and glasses on a small round table, canned food on a shelf, dirty dishes in a bucket, a gas hot plate connected to a propane tank, a telephone attached to the wall.

While I was walking upstairs, I wondered why no one came to see who was in the house.

Now that I’m here, I can see the reason.

Daytona is stretched out on the floor, on one side, his head lolling on his extended arm. The whole front of his shirt is soaked red with blood. As a result of the fall, the comb-over that he so zealously kept in place has split in half. One part is draped lankly over his rolled-up sleeve, while the other sags over his ear, baring the bald spot that he worked tirelessly to conceal. Hearing my footsteps, he moves his eyes without turning his head. When he recognizes me, his alarmed glance relaxes slightly, replaced by a look of relief.

“B … avo.”

His voice is faint and weak, and in fact I guessed more than heard him utter my name. I kneel down beside him. His breathing is labored, with a hissing rattle that seems to be coming from somewhere other than this room.

He’s crying, and I don’t know if it’s from pain or distress. A sob turns into a spurt of reddish foam emerging from between his lips to greet the world. From the corner of his mouth it slithers to the floor, where it turns into a red tear of disappointment.

“Fr … gv … me.”

Forgiveness does not belong to this world. But I have the pretty strong impression that soon neither will he, so I don’t think twice about giving him what he wants.

“Of course I forgive you, you ugly idiot.”

As if prompted by his weeping, tears well up in my eyes too: I cry for him, for myself, for all the idiots just like us, for the whole world that an imperfect god has relegated to the space outside these windows with their filthy glass panes. For all those who made us the way we are, and for us, who allowed them to do it. For this pain that twists my guts, which must not be all that different from what Daytona is feeling.

“What happened?”

“Stabbed … in … chest.”

Each word seems to cost him an infinite effort. He’s at the end of the line, and he knows it. He’s counting his breaths, waiting to draw the last one, the breath that no one can ever fix in their memory, because after that last breath comes nothing. Maybe he’s wondering if it was smart to muster all the venom in his soul in pursuit of the killing he thought would finally make him rich. Or maybe he’s wondering if he made the right decision when he chose this miserable life. Instead of a paycheck for honest work, this: to die like a dog, all alone, bleeding onto a filthy floor in a shithole of an abandoned house. And what does he leave the world as his last bequest? The total nothing that his whole life has amounted to.

“Who did it?”

Making an immense effort, he lifts one hand and raises it to his head. He touches the lank lock of hair and does his best to arrange it on top of his head, in a last clumsy impulse of vanity. I reach out and help him to put his comb-over, glistening with hairspray and dye, back into place.

I repeat the question.

“Who did it, Daytona? Where’s Carla?”

He stares at me without seeing me. He seems to be reliving a scene I never witnessed. Perhaps the scene in which someone killed him. Maybe, the way people say, he’s reliving his whole life. Then he shuts his eyes.

“White … ice…”

They’re his last words.

A surge of nausea rushes up from my stomach and into my throat. I stand up, walk a step or two away, and then I fold over like a switchblade knife snapping shut.