A Pimp's Notes (34 page)

“Just out of curiosity, do you work for the intelligence services?”

He smiles and pretends to ward off a compliment, feigning modesty. Still, I doubt that modesty is one of his strong points.

“To put it that way smacks overmuch of James Bond. All the same, let us say that the field in which I operate could be described in that way.”

“So why me? You were Bonifaci’s trusted assistant. Why did you need to use me?”

He stands up and smooths out his gabardine trousers.

“Regrettably, Lorenzo dismissed me a few months ago. A minor stumbling block. I know everything about him but I was no longer able to interact with him. Villa Bonifaci was off-limits to me.”

He makes a gesture with his hands that explains everything, including the reason I’m going to take a bullet to the head in just a few minutes.

“The only person who could get us into that house under those circumstances was you. Nothing personal, just a matter of opportunity.”

He pauses. Then he gives me a sign of sympathy.

“So sorry.”

From the hallway I hear the sound of the door that leads into the garage. The sound of footsteps on the floor and a few seconds later Carla walks into the living room. She has a gun in her hand. A funny smell trails after her. It takes me just a moment to recognize it, at the exact instant that it overpowers Gabriel Lincoln’s French cologne.

It’s the smell of gunpowder.

Lucio takes a step to one side.

“All done?”

She does two things practically at the same time. First she nods her head yes, then she lifts her right hand and

pfft … pfft …

two tiny spurts of blood right above Chico’s heart stain Mister Lincoln’s fine suit. Lucio moves fast, as if in his mind’s eye he had already envisioned the sequence of what was about to happen. Before Chico’s falling body hits the floor, he’s already torn the gun out of his lifeless hand.

So this time there’s no silencer. The shot rings through the cramped space and out into the broad silence of the night like an explosion. A hole appears in the center of Gabriel Lincoln’s forehead. A thousandth of a second later, his blood and his brains are flung against the curtains over the window right behind him.

He tumbles backward with the expression of someone who fails to understand why they’re dead. No one who’s killed ever really understands why. His limp body is made up of broken lines and it forms a strange geometric pattern contrasting with Chico’s.

Carla has joined us now and stops, looking at the two corpses. Maybe that’s how it happened at Lesmo. With that cold gaze she checked that all life had been expelled once and for all from the bodies strewn on the floor, ready if necessary to fire a final kill shot.

Lucio asks.

“The others?”

Carla answers.

“All gone.”

“Get the suitcases. I’ll finish up here.”

Carla walks quickly past the sofa and through a door at the far end of the room. Through the open door, once she turns the light on, I can see a bedroom. She vanishes inside and the only living souls left in the room are Lucio and me.

He raises the handgun and places the barrel against my temple.

“Sorry, Bravo. The real puzzle was much more complicated than the solution you found.”

“That is to say?”

“What we found in that house made us change plans. Now our plans have nothing to do with our comrades, the struggle, the day of victory that may never come. Now our plans concern only Carla and me.”

A few terse words from Carla block my next question before it leaves my lips.

“I’m afraid you’ve got one name too many in your future plans, Lucio.”

We both turn our heads toward her voice. Just in time to

pfft …

see a small burst of flame emerge from the muzzle of the handgun that Carla is aiming in our direction and carry off a fragment of Lucio’s head. A light spray of blood splatters my jacket and my face. The pressure of the barrel against my temple disappears. Another body joins the other two already sprawled on the floor.

Carla points the gun at me. She waves me to a corner of the room with the barrel of the handgun.

“Get over there and no funny business, unless you want to wind up like him.”

She moves fast. She pulls a rag out of the back pocket of her jeans and she wipes down the handgun she just used to shoot Lucio. Then, holding it by the barrel through the cloth, she kneels down next to the body of Gabriel Lincoln and squeezes his fingers around the handle, to impress his fingerprints upon it.

Then she lets the gun fall to the floor and stands up. All this time she has kept one eye on me. And all this time I’ve been keeping an eye on the second pistol that’s sticking out of the waistband of her pants.

She looks at me. There’s no anxiety in her voice, just the urgency of practical considerations.

“Did you touch anything?”

I shake my head.

“Good. Wait here.”

She disappears through the bedroom door again and reemerges dragging two suitcases. She sets one down next to me.

“Take this one. We have to work fast. Someone might have heard the shot.”

It all happened so fast and without explanation. Lightning, thunder, hail, and suddenly the downpour was finished before I had even realized that water was falling from the sky. Except it wasn’t water, it was blood. I’m stunned by the noise and the smell of the shots, the relief that I’m not one of those bodies lying motionless on the floor.

The only thing I know for sure is that I’m still alive.

We walk back down the hall. The door is still open, the wallpaper’s still ugly, the pungent scent of cordite is still strong. When we walk out onto the landing I can see at a glance what the garage has become. Giorgio is on the floor next to his motorcycle, the front of his shirt soaked with blood, his leather jacket gaping open above his heart. The high school boy is sprawled out on his side, his eyes staring. A red puddle is spreading across the cement from his head. He seems to be looking at Alberto, flat on his belly, even more stout and awkward in his inelegant way of death.

Carla doesn’t give them so much as a glance, as if they formed part of a scene that her mind recorded in the moment and then immediately archived. We walk fast down the stairs. My suitcase is heavy. I don’t know what the fuck’s inside but it’s heavy. Though it’s only a short distance, I’m already panting.

Carla is stronger, leaner, calmer, more efficient.

The word
lethal
comes to my mind, but I dismiss it immediately.

We get to the Kadett and she opens the trunk. She pulls out a pair of work gloves and tosses them to me, one at a time.

“Put these on. Lift the garage door just partway and check to make sure there’s no one out there. Then go out and open the gate.”

I do as I’m told while she puts the suitcases in the car. I find myself outside, in the odorless air of the night, which is already a blessing. I walk up the little concrete drive, guided toward the gate by the violet glow of the city in the distance.

The minute I swing open the metal gates, the engine of the Opel starts up and the car pulls out in reverse. The beams of the headlights glance over the bodies on the ground and then recoil, as if they were disgusted. Only the neon lights on the ceiling remain to illuminate the scene.

The car pulls out onto the road and stops, its headlights pointing in the direction from which I arrived, either a few minutes or a few hours ago. For a second or two, I expect the car to keep going. I expect to be left all alone here in the courtyard of this house filled with corpses, to try to figure out what happened and then have to explain it to the people who would be questioning me.

But the passenger door swings open. In the faint glow of the dashboard I see Carla gesturing for me to get in. With a sigh of relief I sit down beside her, finally allowing my arms and legs to tremble freely. We drive fast to the highway and turn left. Once again, the Luna Park, once again, the Idroscalo, once again, Linate Airport. At the traffic light, as we turn left and head for the city, there’s a prefabricated wall made of cement panels along Viale Forlanini. Someone took a can of black spray paint and left us a graffiti message.

What the fuck is Nelson doing on our ship
?

20

We park outside Carmine’s apartment building. Above the roofs there’s a vague promise of light. A new day is dawning and Carla and I are together again. I indulge in the luxury of a dream, a chimera, the only one available to me in this particular moment. I wish I could go back to a morning like this one and hear her tell me for the first time

If it was you, I’d do it for free …

and believe that it’s all true and answer yes, Jesus Christ yes, from here to the last light my eyes can see yes, for what I am and for what I’m not yes, Goddamn it yes, anywhere you name yes, anyhow you want it yes …

In any world you care to name yes, just not in this one.

Carla’s hand turns the key and kills the engine.

*   *   *

I gave her the address of the apartment in Quarto Oggiaro when she got back in the car after making her phone call.

Toward the end of Viale Forlanini, she stopped outside a phone booth. She got out and I watched her through the windshield as she walked around the hood and then through the car window as she lifted one hand and dropped a token into the slot, dialed a number, waited for someone to answer. Then I watched as she spoke with someone, a short conversation, during which she seemed to be blocking and cutting short questions that the other person was asking.

She hung up and got back in the car. She drove off without haste, her eyes carefully watching the road. Too carefully for me to fail to understand that she was deciding what to do next.

Not what to do with me.

What to do
about
me.

I was the one who broke the silence. I had lots of questions. I wondered how many of them would be answered. I started with the first question, the one prompted not by curiosity, but by surprise.

“Why didn’t you kill me too?”

Immediately after asking that question I turned away and stared at the road ahead of us, for fear of seeing from her face that she had just been asking herself the same thing.

I went on, challenging her intentions and her silence.

“It would have been perfect. Everything would have fit into place. According to the logic of this whole frame-up, my dead body’s the only one missing in that house, on the top of the pile.”

Carla rummaged around in the glove compartment. She held out a package of Kleenex to me.

“Wipe off your face. And take off your jacket, it’s all covered with blood.”

I understood that this was just one of many ploys she had at her disposal to delay answering my question. Or for making me understand that there wasn’t going to be an answer at all. I took off my jacket and tossed it onto the backseat. I turned the rearview mirror toward me, turned on the dome light, and began to wipe spots of Lucio’s blood off my face.

“Where have you been hiding for the past few days?”

I answered without looking at her.

“In a place.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go there.”

I turned off the light and let Milan illuminate Carla instead. She took my silence for uncertainty.

“When I stopped back there I called the police. I told them I’d driven by the house and I thought I’d seen some bodies flat on the floor in the garage. I played the part of a frightened citizen doing her duty but anxious not to get involved.”

She looked at me.

“You need a place to stay until the police find the bodies and reconstruct what happened. The presence of Gabriel Lincoln, Bonifaci’s former assistant, fired without notice, and the discovery that Lucio wasn’t blind, as he wanted the world to believe, will shore up the theory that in this mess you’ve been made the victim of a plot, that you were framed.”

“A lot of points are going to remain murky.”

“In cases like these there are always plenty of murky points. Left murky or intentionally made murky.”

“No. There are other moments for which I have no alibi. And anything I could say or do would only look like an effort to construct one for myself.”

Carla sat in silence. Maybe she’d already thought the same thing and my words were nothing more than a confirmation. Through the windows of the car come the images of a city that just a few days ago I had the gall to consider as something like my own private property. Without realizing that in reality no one owns anything. You can only choose to belong to something. Skill and luck are great aids in making that decision.

Love does the rest. Love can fool you sometimes, but it’s not for sale and it can’t be bought.

Ever.

*   *   *

After giving her the address, I slumped back against my seat. Until we reached our destination, I didn’t say another word. I just sat there, replaying the course of events in my head. I told myself that over the course of just a few days I’d had some unbelievable strokes of good luck. One was when I was saved from Tulip. The other was when I walked out of a house, alive, leaving five corpses behind me. I’m afraid I’ve completely wiped out any credit I might have had with the bank of good luck.

I avoided putting together any theories on why on earth this whole mess was assembled in the first place. The Italian state, the intelligence services, the Red Brigades, various ideals, the class struggle, the armed struggle, were all just so many meaningless clues. I knew that however good my imagination and my skills at solving cryptic enigmas and puzzles, this one was too tough even for me. I had the key to everything sitting next to me. And I still didn’t know whether to expect an explanation from Carla or a bullet in the head.

We get out of the car. I toss the bloodstained jacket into the Dumpster. I doubt that Lucio will have a much more dignified burial. My back aches and my eyes are burning. We walk around to the back of the car and we get out the suitcases. Carla also pulls a travel bag out of the trunk.