A Pimp's Notes (31 page)

I start the car and perform my various turns and switchbacks while checking in the rearview mirror, even more carefully this time. As I drive, I think. The smartest thing for me to do would be to call my lawyer, Ugo Biondi. Then go turn myself in, accompanied by him, in the hope that they’ll believe my story. Leaving aside the fact that today, on a Saturday, I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him, there’s another aspect to the matter that holds me back. I’m afraid that this move might strike the police as a way of further muddling their investigation and creating confusion in a case that’s already sufficiently tangled.

In any case, the consequences would remain unchanged. Until proven otherwise, I’m involved in a terrorism case and I’d be held as a prime suspect until my innocence could be demonstrated categorically.

Which might take months or years. Or might never happen at all.

I spot the familiar silhouette of the massive apartment building in which I’ve taken refuge. I drive through the front gate and leave the car in the courtyard. There are a few people on the grass, but they’re far away and pay no attention to me. I walk into the lobby, and even though I’ve never done any fighting, I feel like a combat veteran after a battle: I hopelessly ride up in the same elevator I rode down in with such confidence.

This time I don’t bother to give the graffiti so much as a glance.

I walk back through the apartment door and close it behind me just as the hallway echoes to the sound of a door lock clattering open. It could be a woman taking her dog out for a walk or just a kid going downstairs to play. But I’m happy I made it inside without being seen.

Now the apartment in which I’m a prisoner and guest strikes me as even more bare and dreary. I take a step or two, take off my jacket, and go over and sit down on a couch that’s still encased in a slipcover. My back immediately adheres to this temporary upholstery and becomes warm and sticky. I lean my head back and look up at the pink ceiling, certainly a design decision of Carmine’s ex-wife.

A thousand thoughts alight and immediately flutter away again. At a certain point, maybe just to bring me back to earth, my body pipes up to remind me that I’m also a living organism with specific physiological requirements.

I pick up my copy of
La Settimana Enigmistica
and I head for the bathroom. There are things you do that, once you’ve repeated them a sufficient number of times, simply become conditioned reflexes. The bathroom still shows traces of my recent shower and haircut. There’s no Signora Argenti here, making sure that when I get home everything is neat and tidy and the floor has been swept.

I drop my trousers and sit down on the toilet. I light a cigarette and start leafing through the magazine. The first thing I see when I open it is the Page of the Sphinx, with a cryptic clue that I don’t even try to solve. I read on, looking only at the jokes and the curiosities. I get to a section called the
Edipeo Enciclopedico
—the Oedipal Encyclopedia—a series of questions of all kinds that allow the reader to test his general knowledge.

I run quickly through the questions, checking each one against the answers, which are given at the bottom of the page. I absorb them as simple facts, without giving too much importance to them. I’m halfway through the section when a question catches my interest. I check the answer and, as is always the way with lucky hunches, the solution comes to me at the speed of thought. In my mind all the letters of the Scrabble game are suddenly present on the board, forming a series of words with a complete meaning.

Actually just two words.

A first name and a last name.

18

I push the button and hear a bell ring inside. It’s a familiar sound. After what seems like an eternity, a voice issues from behind the door. It’s familiar too.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me, Bravo.”

The door suddenly flies open. An alarmed expression is stamped on Lucio’s face. The lenses of his dark glasses reflect the ceiling lamp on the landing. He gropes for my arm and drags me inside. He slams the door behind me as if he were trying to keep out the devil. His tone of voice is that of someone who believes that in spite of everything he’s done, the devil has still managed to get inside.

“Have you lost your mind? What are you doing here? Every policeman in Milan is looking for you. They’ve even come by to question me.”

“I know. But I need your help.”

Lucio takes a step back.

“Christ, are you trying to get me in trouble, too?”

“No. I’ve been forced to learn how to be careful. I checked to make sure no one was following me before I came up here. Don’t worry, no one saw me.”

He relaxes, but not so much that the tension is gone entirely. Perhaps, just as with Laura, he’s a little bit afraid of me.

He’s brusque and dismissive.

“What do you want?”

“I need you to help me solve the mystery.”

Astonishment. Resentment. Rage.

“Which one?
Starlets going incognito in an opera libretto
? You’re willing to risk prison for yourself and for me for a piece of bullshit like that?”

“No, that’s not what I was talking about. That’s easy. The solution is
sunglasses
—that is,
sung-lasses
. I’d even forgotten about it, think of that. I meant the other one, the mystery that you’ve posed all this time and that was far more difficult to decipher.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Lucio, how long have you been a member of the Red Brigades?”

He was walking over to the table. His uncertain gait suddenly comes to a halt, and he turns in my direction with a helpless, incredulous smile.

“Bravo, are you crazy? Me, in the Red Brigades? How on earth could I do it, in my condition—”

I interrupt him, with my voice and with a wave of my hand. So that he can hear me and see me.

“You’re not blind, Lucio. You never have been.”

He sits without speaking. He watches me from behind his lenses. Now I know that he can.

I go over and pull open the drawer and find the pictures of Lucio together with the other members of his alleged band. At this point I have to wonder if there was ever a musical group that called itself Les Misérables. I pull out the photographs and study the figures captured on the matte paper. Not to make sure—I have no need. Just to confirm that all our tricks and wiles, however refined they may be, one way or another, ultimately demand payment, perhaps with a twenty-year journey back to Ithaca.

Or a twenty-year prison sentence.

I toss those colorful rectangles onto the table, next to him.

“The photographs you showed me. The ones of you playing with your group, when according to you your eyes were already shot.”

Instinctively I wave my hand at the pictures.

“Your eyes are red in the picture. If there’s a red dot in the middle of your eye in a photograph, it means your eyes are perfectly healthy. Isn’t it ironic? I found the solution in my weekly puzzler magazine, of all places.”

Lucio sits there, lost in thought for a minute.

Then he smiles.

At last, with a resigned gesture, he removes his glasses, revealing the glaring sight of his pupils covered with a white film. He cups a hand under one eye and lets the first contact lens fall into it. He does the same thing with the second lens. He squints both eyes a couple of times, finally free. He lays on the table that slight contrivance that has offered him enormous shelter for so many years now.

As if our movements were synchronized by a fate imposed from above, I extract the pistol from my waistband, with the silencer screwed on again.

Maybe that’s why Lucio recognizes it immediately. And he understands that, in this case, I’m quite willing to use it.

“Ah, so you found it, after all.”

His voice is relaxed, untroubled, and when he says it he’s simply acknowledging an obvious fact. It doesn’t seem to bother him a bit that the eye of the barrel is pointing straight at his belly. He’s a cold-blooded creature. I could hardly expect any other reaction from him.

“That’s right. As you can see, I found it.”

He crosses his legs. His movements are more fluid, now that the masquerade is over. Now that he can use his eyes and look reality in the face without having to hide.

“How did you figure it out?”

I shrug modestly.

“A series of details. Various minor oversights. Errors, marginal ones if you like, but add them up and it amounts to an ironclad case.”

“Such as?”

“Substituting another car for mine was a brilliant solution. The only problem was that it didn’t smell of tobacco inside. Whereas my car was driven by a regular smoker. At that point, I think you’ll agree, checking the serial number on the chassis was a brilliant idea on my part.”

He gives me that point with a complete absence of commentary. His irony, which once seemed like the armor of an otherwise defenseless man, seems to have vanished into thin air.

I’m in the presence of a hard, emotionless, pitiless person.

A murderer.

“Go on.”

“Error number two: in the envelope that Daytona gave me to hand over there was nothing but a stack of cut newspapers.”

Lucio leaps to his feet, his features tense and drawn, showing that he actually does possess a nervous system.

“That chicken thief was a greedy, slippery idiot. There was supposed to be real money in that envelope. He stole it, thinking that no one would ever know.”

I wave him seated with the muzzle of the handgun. By the time his ass is flat on the chair again, he has regained his composure.

“You killed him, didn’t you?”

His calm becomes nonchalance.

“Yes, I did. And I enjoyed it, I have to say. That piece of shit was a menace to everyone he came into contact with. In the end, he was only a menace to himself.”

That’s what I’d figured. I should have guessed from the start that the White Isis had nothing to do with it. That poor devil was gasping for his last few breaths. When I asked him who it was, when I asked him where Carla had gone,
White ice
was the last thing he managed to utter. What he was actually trying to say was: the guy with white eyes.

Or something of the sort.

It makes me mad to hear Lucio talk like that about Daytona. It makes me mad to think that he’s responsible for the death of three beautiful young women. It makes me mad to think that he killed the men of the security detail, who were guilty of nothing but doing their job. It makes me mad to think that he’s played with me like a toy. My fondest wish is to pull the trigger and lodge a bullet in his skull, two bullets, three bullets …

With the comfort of a silencer, capable of transforming three gunshots into three hushed arrows.

Pfft … pfft … pfft …

Maybe I’ll do it. But not right away. There are still things he needs to tell me.

And he knows that.

His irony surfaces again, except that now it’s veering over into the spiteful realm of contempt.

“It’s hard to resist, isn’t it?”

“Resist what?”

“It’s hard to resist the temptation to pull the trigger when you’re looking at someone you hate.”

“What do you do in those cases?”

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

“Oscar Wilde.”

He looks at me with some surprise that I knew the source of his quote. His eyes are dark; they seem to be trying to enter into me.

“Who are you, Bravo?”

“Somebody who wants information, sitting across from someone who can supply it.”

I give him a moment to think it over, so that he can fully appreciate the roles that have been assigned.

“Let me tell you a few things. I’m just going to ask you to interrupt me when I get something wrong.”

Step by step I lay out my reconstruction of events for him, as I composed it in my head during my time in Carmine’s apartment. The role that Carla played, Daytona’s part, the murder of Tulip, Laura’s defection, the maneuver to deprive me of an alibi, the elimination of witnesses, right up to my own suicide as the epilogue of a story that began and ended in total delirium.

I get to the end without being interrupted even once.

Then he deigns to give me the luxury of his consideration.

“You’re smarter than I thought.”

“It’s not that I’m smarter than you thought. It’s that you’re not as smart as you thought you were.”

“Is that what you think?”

“That’s what I think.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He smiles at me and for just a second I see Lucio’s old expression, the one he used to put on when he made a wisecrack. It’s there for only an instant and then it’s gone, like all pleasant memories when they’re replaced by the present.

After which he looks at a point somewhere over my shoulder.

“Take his gun.”

The moment he utters that word, I feel something small, round, and hard press against the nape of my neck. It doesn’t take me long to figure out that it’s the muzzle of a pistol. From behind my back comes a voice that won’t take no for an answer.

Chico’s voice.

“Throw the gun on the couch. And put your hands up.”

Then I hear another voice. I know this one too.

“And don’t get any funny ideas. There are two of us.”

I toss the gun on the couch, hoping it might go off and kill someone. As stupid as I feel right now, it’d be fine with me if the one it killed was me. The first rule is to inspect the apartment, and I ignored that rule because I was so anxious to glory in my idiotic triumph.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

The pressure on the back of my neck lightens.

“Move over to the wall.”

I move as instructed. Giorgio Fieschi walks into my field of view and reaches down to the couch. He picks up the Beretta, making it the second gun pointing at me. Seeing him here, for some reason, doesn’t surprise me all that much.

“So you’re in on this, too.”

“As you can see.”

There’s nothing left of the clean and naïve young man who used to hang out at the Ascot Club. He has the determined face and the brisk motions of a professional. This is an evening of revelations and transformations. I look at him and I see him on the stage. Young, talented, with the world in the palm of his hand. If it’s true what I thought at the time—that the other artists were afraid of his skills—I think now how astonished they would be to discover how much more afraid of him they should have been.