A Pimp's Notes (36 page)

“At that point Bonifaci gave in. He told us where the vault was and gave us the combination. When we opened it, Lucio shot him.”

The flame flickers and undulates with a hypnotic power, as do Carla’s words as they waft in from the other room.

“Inside the vault we found what we were looking for. We packed up the dossiers and then we went back upstairs. When we got there, there were only corpses in the drawing room.”

I see that the dark liquid is beginning to bubble up, under the tilted-back lid of the espresso pot. I lower the lid. I wait for the sound of the last spurts gurgling in the throat of the percolator. I turn off the flame, pick up the pot, and go back to the other room.

Carla is motionless, her arms flat on the table, her gaze lost in the middle distance. I pour espresso into the cup on the table in front of her. I fill my cup too.

“Chico and Alberto went straight to your apartment building to replace your car. I went with the others to the house on Via Rivoltana with the dossiers.”

Carla reaches out and picks up the demitasse. She sips her coffee.

I realize that I don’t want my coffee. I just want Carla to finish her story.

“Tell me about Lucio.”

Actually, I want to ask her about that night. The night she …

Her voice breaks into my thoughts.

“Lucio was tired. I could see that he really couldn’t stand the life he was leading. He was sick of living in hiding, of being a virtual prisoner, a captive of his disguise. All of his ideological discourses were concocted to use on other people, just so much smoke and mirrors. A life in hiding and on the run just wears you down, and sooner or later you look for an alternative. Any alternative, whatever the price, as long as you can hold your head up and live in the light of day. I started sleeping with him and I won him over, because I was certain of one thing.”

“What was that?”

“That once he got his hands on those documents, he’d recognize that they offered him the alternative he’d been dreaming of. And so I pretended to be his accomplice in exploiting them.”

“Which means?”

“Keeping the documents for ourselves. With those papers in our possession, we would have as much power as Bonifaci. They would become our insurance policy and a bottomless well of cash.”

She finishes her second cup of coffee. I light another cigarette.

“Everyone’s dream. Freedom, immunity, money.”

She looks at me.

“There was just one problem.”

I wait in silence for her to confirm what I had already guessed.

“I was equally certain that Lucio would use me to eliminate the others and then, once he’d achieved that objective, he’d get rid of me too. So I had no choice. Either him or me.”

I tap the ashes from my cigarette into the coffee cup. They sizzle faintly when they hit the liquid. There’s one more thing I want to know.

“What motivated you to take part in this thing?”

“The same reasons that everyone does everything. Money. A chance at power. Take your pick.”

She looks at her hands.

“A lot of things that don’t make any sense now.”

She pauses and then her eyes are on me again. I don’t know what she’s looking for in my face. I don’t know what she’s finding there. I take a last drag on my Marlboro and then douse it in the demitasse.

There’s one last question, the most important one of all.

“What do you plan to do now?”

Carla shifts uneasily in her chair.

“I don’t know exactly.”

In silence, my eyes follow her as she stands up and walks over to the suitcases lying on the floor. She points to them with one hand.

“But one thing I do know is that if I do hand over this material to the person who sent me to get it, within the hour I’ll be a dead woman.”

I look at her. I get back the exact same look.

We’ve become twin mirrors.

In her eyes is a foreshadowing of the only certainty available to every human being. I see the weariness and disenchantment you see in combat veterans, in people who have snuffed out the lives of others and now realize that it was all pointless. But who still have to fight for their own lives.

Carla suddenly regains the decisive tone of voice of someone who’s just made a decision.

“Give me a six-hour head start and then go to the police.”

“What am I going to tell them?”

“Everything that happened.”

“They’ll never believe me. I have no alibi and I don’t have a scrap of evidence.”

“You’ll have both.”

Carla leans over and snaps open the lock of one of the suitcases. It’s filled with rigid file folders of different thicknesses and colors, each one closed with an elastic fastener and bearing a label on the front. She flips through a number of them before she finds the one she’s looking for. She pulls it out, opens it, skims it rapidly. She lays it on the floor. She relocks the suitcase and takes a jacket out of her bag. When she stands up, she’s holding the file in her hand and is wearing the jacket.

“This file contains documents and evidence that will get the person who organized all this dead to rights. There’s enough evidence here to nail him to whatever wall happens to be closest. This is your new life insurance policy.”

She walks over and lays the file on the chest of drawers. Then Carla goes back to the suitcases.

“The other files will be my policy.”

“Where will you go?”

“The less you know, the better.”

Her face tells me that where she’s going is a mystery to her too. I hope that wherever it is, it’s a place where she can be at peace. But I’m certain it won’t be.

“Do you have money?”

“Yes. There was plenty of money in Bonifaci’s vault. That man didn’t trust banks. Not even the banks he owned.”

There’s not much left to say. Carla comes over to me and brushes my lips with hers.

“I wish I were a different person with a different life, I wish I’d met you in a different way. It could have been so nice.”

From the smell of her skin and the warmth of her lips a question springs spontaneously. A question I regret the instant I utter it.

“Will I ever see you again?”

She lays a finger on my lips, to keep me from saying anything more. Her eyes are a wish and, at the same time, a verdict. Then she turns around, opens the door, picks up her bag and the suitcases, and drags them out onto the landing. The door closes behind her, erasing Carla’s figure until it becomes a wooden panel and nothing more.

And now I’m alone.

The sound of the elevator coming up to my floor means the beginning of a trip. Which in Carla’s case will mean being on the run for the rest of her life, in a way that will make the rest of her life a curse. And I’m equally cursed, if not more, because I can’t muster the slightest remorse over the pity I feel for a murderer.

21

The exhaustion washes over me the instant I realize that it’s all over.

Here I am, still on my feet, finally immobile. The tension, fear, and excitement have all vanished suddenly, and now that the typhoon has stopped gusting, I feel hollow as a reed. There’s not a milligram of adrenaline in my veins, and perhaps there’s not a drop of blood either. I feel certain it’s spattered all over a floor somewhere else in this city. While here, in the middle of this room, I’m only kidding myself that I’m still alive.

That’s why I feel such a strong need for sleep. Because sleep is the natural state of the dead.

I look over at the file on the chest of drawers, lying there full of secrets. I don’t even feel a twinge of curiosity, an urge to open it up and find out a name. What happened in the past few days belongs to the past, and like everything in the past I’m certain it holds no lessons for me or anyone else. All I know is that I had an opportunity and I let it slip through my fingers.

Chaos and chance, remember
?

I walk into the bedroom. I stretch out on the mattress and stuff a pillow without a pillowcase under my head. Almost the second I have the pillow in place, I fall asleep. My last thought, before dropping off, is that Carla asked me to give her six hours.

First hour
.

I sleep.

Carla drives through the streets of Milan, on a radiant Sunday morning. A lazy day for the rest of the world. Breathless with urgency for her. She parks her car in any of the thousands of parking places at Linate Airport. She knows that she’ll never come back to pay her parking bill. She doesn’t bother to wipe the car clean of fingerprints. The way things stand, it turns out it was a waste of time to have wiped the house on Via Rivoltana clean of fingerprints. A few miles away, in a small isolated villa full of dead bodies, photographers are taking snapshots to record the location and position of the corpses on a roll of film. The flashbulbs emit light for scant fractions of a second, searching in vain for a reflected glint of life in those dead eyes. Technicians from the police forensic squad are conducting tests to determine what kind of gun fired the shots, how many shots were fired, where they were fired from.

Second hour
.

I sleep.

Carla pulls a luggage trolley from the rack and piles it high with suitcases, thinking to herself that sometimes survival can be a heavy thing. She walks into the terminal and looks up at the departures panel listing times and flights. Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Caracas. One place is as good as another. It doesn’t matter where the flight’s going, what counts is when it’s leaving. A few miles away, in a small, isolated villa, cars pull up, escorting other cars that transport the people who count. The people who decide right then and right there what to do, what to say, what to leave unsaid. Men wander around, point, make guesses, check papers, utter names. One of those names is mine.

Third hour
.

I sleep.

Carla has purchased a first-class ticket on the first plane with a seat available. She paid cash, which is something she’ll get used to doing from now on, and for a long time. Perhaps she showed a false passport in which the only thing left of Carla Bonelli is the photograph. Assuming that’s actually her name. She’s checked her bags at the ticket window and now she’s walking through the gate with a boarding pass in her hand. She’s hoping the luggage isn’t lost on the flight. There’s a risk of that happening, but there’s always risk in life. Especially in her life. She boards the shuttle, takes a seat at the far end, and waits for the rest of the passengers to do the same. In the travel bag at her feet is clothing and cash. She threw the handgun into a trash can in the parking lot. A few miles away, in a small isolated villa, a medical examiner authorizes the removal of the dead bodies. When they’re gone, what’s left is the chalk outlines of the bodies and the tape markings where shell casings were found. Outside, journalists are clustering around the gate. As always, thanks to their unnamed sources, they’re on the trail of something big, and now they want information. Just a little information, a few scraps, enough to trigger that personal hand grenade that is a reporter’s imagination.

Fourth hour
.

I sleep.

The airplane’s in line for takeoff, awaiting authorization. Carla has placed her travel bag in the overhead compartment, with the helpful assistance of a stewardess. A few passengers give her knowing glances. Glances that contain the history of the world, but not the history of Carla. If they knew that story, they’d immediately dive back into the newspapers they’re holding in front of them. Other passengers are ignoring her, but they’re doing it ostentatiously. Perhaps they hope she’ll notice them for it. A few miles away, in a small isolated villa, a few men remain on guard until seals have been placed on doors and windows. The people who count are leaving, heading for meetings where they’ll have to report to people who count more than they do, people who in turn will have to report to the people who count most of all. The staircase goes straight up, and it appears to be endless, but the important thing is to be careful of that last step, because after that one you plunge downward into the void. A few miles away, an underworld criminal named Tano Casale is turning a Totocalcio lottery ticket over and over in his hands; he believes it’s a winning ticket and he’s wondering what to do. My suggestion has intrigued him, captured his imagination. The fact that I’m a wanted man has caused him a slight problem, but he’s decided to wait and see how things turn out. He’s coming to the conclusion that he can do it all by himself, that after all he doesn’t need anyone else. After all, he’s the king of the world as well as the boss of part of Milan.

Fifth hour
.

I sleep.

By now the airplane is a dot in the distance, as seen from the ground. A trail of smoke at takeoff that will be the same as the trail of smoke on landing, only scattered into a different sky. Carla shivers slightly with cold, the aftermath of tension and fatigue. Her mind is blank and her body demands rest. She has decided to put off until her arrival all planning, all thoughts for the future, all hypothetical strategies. She’s tilted her seat back into the most comfortable position, she’s tucked a pillow under her head, and she’s covered herself with the thin blanket provided by the airline. The engines are buzzing in the tail and it’s easy to drift away. Many miles away, meetings are being held to determine the official version of events and what items to leave out, under cover of personal or state secrecy. A police detective named Stefano Milla is trying to decide whether it’s worth the risk to buy the Alfa Romeo Spider roadster he dreams of. He can imagine himself driving it, the wind in his hair. He can afford it, and he doesn’t feel the slightest remorse for the way he got the money. The only problem he has is explaining his sudden prosperity.

Sixth hour
.

Carla is asleep.

I wake up.

My wristwatch tells me a time that means nothing. I think of turning on the television set but immediately dismiss the idea. I’d be looking at Corrado on
Domenica In
or Arbore’s band on
L’altra domenica
. There’s no television news at this hour on a Sunday. People want entertainment: some people decide not to know, others decide to forget. It’s a deeply human application of the commutative property. Whichever you choose, the sum remains unchanged. In any case, the only thing I could learn from any public news outlet is how fragmentary the reports are that I already know in complete detail.