A Pimp's Notes (32 page)

I realize to my astonishment that I’m not afraid of him. I’m just disappointed. The way you are whenever you see a missed opportunity.

“You’re good. You’re brilliant, I have to say. You could have done important things.”

He looks at me the way you’d look at a mental defective.

“I’m doing them.”

“Was Laura one of them?”

He shrugs with indifference.

“Laura was a whore. She sold her ass to the highest bidder. No better than you. We’re at war, and in terms of the goal we’re fighting for, she was nothing but a pawn we were willing to sacrifice.”

Lucio breaks in. He’s still sitting where he was, expressionless as he watches his comrades reduce me from threatening to threatened. I too have undergone my own little transformation.

“As you have no doubt figured out for yourself, so are you.”

Without a word, I wait for the rest.

He stands up and takes a step toward me. We look each other in the eye, which is something we could have done a long time ago if he weren’t he and I weren’t I.

“Bravo, I don’t believe that however much I might explain it to you, you can ever understand what’s happening in this country. You belong to the category of people who don’t pay attention to what’s around them. People who could walk through a concentration camp without noticing its horrors because they’re on their way to get an aperitif at the Bar Tre Gazzelle. While you were sleeping your days away and fooling yourself that you were living by night, the world changed and none of you noticed. There was 1968, then 1977, class warfare, armed battles in the streets. All of them things without meaning for you. Worse still, things you knew nothing about. You’re nothing but a faint mist, a stretch of nothingness between good and evil.”

“It strikes me as obvious that you believe evil is the people you kidnap, hurt, and kill. I think it’s equally obvious that you believe that good is the things that you do.”

He shakes his head, bitterly.

“No. We’re only an armed force in the service of good, willing to resemble evil in order to become strong enough to defeat it.”

“You’re insane.”

He replies as if this were the real solution to every puzzle.

“No, Bravo. I’m a dead man. Just like you are.”

Chico breaks in to interrupt this secular confession.

“What do we do now?”

I take a look at him. He’s a young man, a little shorter than average, with curly hair and sideburns that make him look like a hippie at Woodstock. The civic-minded volunteer serving as a companion for a blind man has just tossed a practical question onto the table.

Giorgio Fieschi puts in his two cents, with a hint of impatience in his voice.

“We’ve got to get out of here. And fast. I’m not comfortable in this place.”

“There’s a car with two plainclothes policemen watching the front entrance. How can we get him out of here without them seeing us?”

Chico has just confirmed a problem that I had already identified and worked around myself, in the path I took to get into the apartment building. Behind the shelter of a stand of trees, I’d climbed over the enclosure wall at the corner of its longer perimeter, opposite the building, where it borders a field overgrown with bushes. Then I walked along the wall, crouching low so as to remain out of the line of sight of the two plainclothesmen sitting in the suspicious-looking Alfa Romeo.

I was counting on the fact that the watch that the police put on the apartment building would probably be reasonably perfunctory, since no one really thought that I’d be stupid enough to try to come back to my own apartment. But obviously that same route can’t be taken more than once, and certainly not by a group of people.

Lucio studies me as if this were the first time he’s laid eyes on me. His eyes remain on me while his mind goes somewhere else. When he returns, he brings the spark of intuition with him.

“I’ve got an idea. You all wait here.”

Lucio leaves the room and vanishes down the hallway.

The three of us sit in this living room without sharp edges or corners, each of us with a deep and abiding certainty. The two of them that they’re in the right. Me, that I’ve come to the end of the line. This time there won’t be any guardian angels to protect me, the way they did when it was Tulip holding a gun on me. Now those angels have become the threat, the mortal danger.

We wait in silence, because everything we could say to each other in the same language has already been said. Going any further would be nothing more than a pointless journey to Babel.

The sound of footsteps in the hallway announces Lucio’s return. He comes in carrying a guitar. He’s shaved off his long and unkempt beard. He’s got a long brunette wig on his head and a fake mustache of the same color. It’s not the most realistic looking getup, but it’s nighttime and he can rely on the fact that all cats are gray in the dark.

He smiles at the expression on my face.

“We all need to be actors in life, don’t you think?”

He walks over to the coatrack and pulls down his jacket and the hat he usually wears. He tosses them over to me, forcing me to reach out and grab them in midair.

“You made things easier for us when you cut your hair and left your face unshaven. It makes us look very much alike, if you take into account the fact that we both have roughly the same build. The plainclothes officers out there are expecting to see a blind musician leave the building with his usual volunteer companion. And that’s exactly what we’ll give them, but this time with an extra fan in the entourage.”

Chico understands and smiles. He holds the pistol out to Lucio, who makes it become part of his hand in an entirely natural way.

“I’ll bring the car around. Then I’ll come up to get you and the guitars.”

He leaves, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze through. Giorgio Fieschi asks for instructions for himself.

“I came on my motorcycle. What should I do?”

“Wait fifteen minutes after we leave. Then catch up with us in the place you know.”

Lucio has the confidence of a born leader, and he’s capable of transmitting it to his men. I’m pretty sure that this whole masquerade is amusing him, as well as giving him a surge of adrenaline. When he notices that I’m still standing motionless in the middle of the room with the jacket and hat in my hand, he waves the gun at me impatiently. In fact, he repeats the exact same gesture that I employed when I told him to sit down.

“What are you waiting for? Get dressed.”

I shrug on the jacket and clap Lucio’s hat on my head. He steps over to the table. He gathers up his contact lenses, looks at them with a faint smile, then slips them into his pocket. He picks up the dark glasses and tosses them to me. I put them on, losing a little light and a few details in the bargain. There are no mirrors in the apartment to check the results, but I’m pretty sure that the rule governing cats and the dark applies to me as well as Lucio.

My impression is confirmed by none other than him.

“You’re perfect. I don’t have time to give you guitar lessons, but I don’t think you’re going to be asked to play.”

The car must have been parked nearby because it’s only a couple of minutes before there’s a knock at the door. Giorgio walks over and lets Chico in, but only after cautiously opening the peephole and checking to make sure it’s him.

“We can go.”

Chico comes close to me and locks arms with me, holding me on his left. His voice lacks the tone of kindness he used when he did this with Lucio. His gestures are harsh and powerful. His right hand jams the muzzle of the pistol against my side.

“Walk nice, short steps. Don’t look where you’re putting your feet, just look straight ahead of you. I’ll guide you.”

To emphasize the order he jams the barrel of the gun roughly into my ribs.

“Is that clear?”

I nod my head yes.

Giorgio opens the door. The first ones down the stairs are me and Chico. Lucio walks down the stairs with the guitars in hand, bringing up the rear. The night air is cool and there’s no one in sight. It’s a last little scrap of winter, discouraging loiterers and open-air conversations. The car, a white Opel Kadett, is parked directly outside the glass doors.

One guitar is placed in the trunk, the other is propped up in the backseat, behind the driver and next to Chico. I’m in the passenger seat. There’s a handgun discreetly aimed at me the whole time. As soon as Lucio starts the engine, I feel the muzzle of the pistol rise back up to tickle the nape of my neck.

We pull out.

Without any unexpected problems, we leave the Quartiere Tessera behind us, with all its police surveillance and all its indifference. I wonder to myself whether Lucio will ever be able to get over this part of his life. I look at him as he drives wordlessly, curious to see him for the first time doing something that I thought was forever forbidden to him.

He’d be surprised to know just how similar we are, how much time we’ve both spent hiding, pretending to be something that we’ve never been, while waiting to understand something that we’d never become.

I think it’s too late now anyway. None of it would change a thing. Now that everything’s been unveiled, there’s only one thing that Lucio can devote the rest of his life to. The thing that makes his gaze harden, the thing that persuaded him to abandon the world of words and conversation and to take up arms. Every revolution has its victims and its martyrs. I have the feeling that I’m going to leave this life without any idea of which role I’ve been assigned.

As we pull onto the beltway heading east, I take off my sunglasses and look out the car window at the lights of Milan. I’m not wearing a blindfold, which means that my captors aren’t worried about letting me see where they’re taking me. In any case, it’ll become obvious immediately, as soon as they stage whatever it is they intend me to take part in. If you stop to think about it, it’s all just theater. Though in this case the show will end after opening night, because death never sticks around for a repeat performance.

19

We exit the beltway at Viale Forlanini, in the direction of Linate Airport.

Lucio drives, his face illuminated intermittently by the lights of oncoming cars and streetlamps, his eyes riveted to the road. He’s taken off the wig and false mustache and he’s gone back to being himself. Which is to say, someone that I don’t really know at all. He’s lit a cigarette, and that gives me a clear gauge of his chilly self-control. There was never the slightest whiff of tobacco in his apartment—never a trace of this addiction. Which means he never smoked, even when there was no one there to see him.

I wonder what his life would have been like if he’d dedicated his considerable gifts and determination to something constructive instead of all this destruction. I answer myself with the thought that maybe he tried, pursuing an ideal that day by day shrank to an idea, until music stopped being his refuge and turned into his hiding place. I answer myself that maybe he is wondering the same thing about me.

We come to the end of the boulevard and our way is cleared by a green traffic light allowing us to make a quick left turn, down toward the Idroscalo. We leave the lights of the airport behind us, where at this time of night there are few passengers and infrequent flights. The dull roar of a plane taking off promises a new horizon, but instead it’s just one more trip toward identical situations and different people. The illusion lasts no longer than the time between takeoff and landing, with the sole comfort of a fitful sleep in an uncomfortable seat. We drive around the outskirts of the Luna Park. The amusement park is closed: the stalls where you can win a goldfish have their shutters pulled down, the skeletal attractions stand immersed in the darkness, and the flying saucers are all covered with canvas tarps. The next ride, the next thrill: they’re all done for the day, and it’ll be tomorrow before there’s another chance to knock down the pyramid of milk bottles.

For the duration of the trip, no one has spoken. Chico, in the backseat, has relaxed, and the pressure of the pistol muzzle on the back of my neck is gone now. Still, I’m sure the gun is in his hand, aimed straight at my head. One false move on my part, a light tug on the trigger, and

pfft …

with the sound of an air rifle, my skull would shatter like a plaster target at the shooting range. What I once was would be nothing more than the red spray of blood on the windshield, in a macabre airbrushed pattern.

And yet I feel strangely chilly and remote.

I’d been afraid to ask the only questions that I really cared about getting the answers to. Why ask questions that would only make me more helpless and defenseless?

What happened to Carla?

What role has she actually played in this whole thing?

I can’t imagine her with a gun in her hand, pulling the trigger and eradicating the lives of people that a twisted ideology identifies as her enemies. Wiping out the lives of girls with whom she had been laughing and kidding around just a few hours earlier, masking her contempt and her intentions. I can’t bring myself to envision her in the garb and the mind-set of someone who looks at the world around them and sees only dead bodies sprawled in puddles of blood and considers what they’ve just done to be something normal.

Perhaps that’s because every time I try, those sequences in my mind are overlaid by her eyes, too beautiful to be true, too beautiful to be false. Maybe because, in spite of everything that’s happened, I never really moved away from that sidewalk, cool with the dawn air, and from the warmth of her words.

If it was you, I’d do it for free …

I look at Lucio and remember his body clinging to the body of Carla. As I sat there watching them, it was as if their pleasure was mine. Suddenly I feel a wave of resentment and self-pity sweep over me. Not because I’m a prisoner, not because I’m about to die. But because when it’s all said and done, the only thing I really want to know is whether that night, in a nondescript apartment in the Quartiere Tessera, that act of love was a gift meant for me or for him.

We drive on along Via Rivoltana, past Segrate. At a certain point we take a right turn. A couple of kilometers later we come to a small, isolated house. A gate, a low enclosure wall topped by a metal railing, a small patch of lawn dotted with rock-spray bushes and a pine tree in the distance.