A Pimp's Notes (45 page)

“Everything’s taken care of. As soon as you’ve registered, the porter will help you with your luggage. Have an enjoyable stay at El Pueblo del Viento, Mr. and Mrs. McKay.”

The child throws his arms in the air in a sign of victory.

“Yay!”

The man smiles at me. A smile that evokes baseball games, barbecues with friends, family camping trips, a well-paid job.

A lawyer, I’d guess. Or a doctor.

“Let me thank you. And let me introduce myself properly. My name is Paul McKay. You’ve already met my son, Malcolm.”

He points to the woman standing beside him.

“And this is my wife, Luisa. She’s Italian, as are you, I’d imagine.”

I shake the hand that Carla extends. In my mind, Luisa is the name of a stranger.

“A pleasure to meet you, Signora. I must say that our country is honored to be represented by someone like you.”

Carla responds only with a nod and a tight smile.

I take a step back.

“Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have a few things to see to.”

I walk away and head for the reception desk.

I ask myself how I feel.

Who can say?

I certainly can’t, not now that I’ve just had one more confirmation of the fact that it really is a small world. At a moment when chaos and chance have just paid a call to remind me that they never sleep and that the same rules as ever still apply. You can try to decide what you want to do with your life, but often it’s life itself that decides what it wants to do with you.

I step up to the reception desk. I ask one of the girls at the desk to hand me the phone. I call my secretary. She answers on the first ring.

“Rosita Seguro.”

“Rosita, do me a favor, please. Immediately inform Helizondo, Manzana, Cortes, and Llosa that I’ve run into a scheduling problem. Ask them whether it would be possible to postpone today’s meeting and find out the date that would be most convenient for them.”

“As you say, Señor Sangiorgi.”

I hand the receiver back to the young woman and I turn to go to the office that I had built across from the kitchens. As soon as I’m safely inside, with the door closed, I go over to pour myself a glass of water.

I swallow it all in a single gulp. I remember my father taking a long drink of water, many years ago. I still don’t understand that man, but I do understand the need for a glass of water at certain times in your life. I sit down behind my desk and sink back into the comfort of the leather swivel chair.

I canceled my meeting because I’m certain that I wouldn’t have the necessary focus to talk about business. I wouldn’t be able to look at the faces of those men, utter words and listen to the words of others, be with them in the conference room. I couldn’t do it, just minutes after the past had come to find me and I found myself looking into Carla’s eyes.

If it was you, I’d do it for free …

It’s been years and yet it’s all so vivid in my memory that I feel as if it’s all still happening to me. Daytona’s comb-over, the cool morning air outside of the Ascot Club, Tulip’s flashlight somersaulting through the air in the darkness, Tano Casale’s voice, Lucio’s dark glasses, Carmine’s face …

There’s not a detail, a word, or a color missing.

Especially the red spatters of blood.

In the silence of my thoughts, I hear a knock at the door.

“Yes?”

The door opens partway and the face of a boy on my staff pokes through.

“Señor Sangiorgi, there’s a woman who wishes to speak with you.”

I sigh. I didn’t think it would be so soon.

Something somewhere is beating in a forbidden way. However much time may pass, my heart will never be a reliable accomplice.

“Show her in.”

I stand up and wait until Carla has come into the office. I point to the chair in front of the desk. As soon as she’s seated, I sit down myself.

I look at her. Ten years have only refined and softened her beauty. In her I sense that restless gentle hush of the hour just before sunset, when the sun shines warmer and brighter to make us forgive the darkness that will fall once it leaves. Her hair color and style still match the line that Alex first set, many years ago.

Her eyes are the same as they always were. And, I imagine, as they always will be.

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 …

But it wasn’t.

“
Ciao
, Bravo.”

I can’t help but smile.

“No one’s called me that in years.”

“I always thought that nickname suited you so well.”

I say nothing. She continues.

“But instead, after all these years, here you are with a name that can’t be easy to carry.”

“It’s my name. There was a time when I thought one name was as good as another.” I allow myself a pause. “I was wrong.”

I pull out a pack of cigarettes. I offer her one. To my surprise, she refuses.

She flashes a smile at the sight of my baffled face.

“Time passes, and resisting bad habits becomes easier.”

I light my cigarette alone, thinking to myself that that’s not always true.

“Your husband seems like a very nice person.”

“He is.”

“And your son is a lovely child. Smart, I’d say.”

She smiles. The smile extends to her eyes this time.

“Oh, he’s smart all right, maybe too smart.”

“How are you?”

There’s no real curiosity in my question, only a hint of regret.

“You summed it up nicely. I have a husband, a son. They help to keep me from thinking.”

I lean my elbows on the desk. I know what she means. Sometimes, thinking can be really unpleasant work.

I change my tone of voice.

“What can I do for you?”

She searches for the words.

She finds them.

“When I left, there was no time to talk. But I did tell you a story.”

Her memories aren’t enough for her. That happens sometimes, when they aren’t nice ones.

“Now you owe me a story too.”

I wonder if she really has been thinking about it all these years. The answer is that I would have thought about it myself, if I were in her shoes.

“A story, you say?”

I minimize with the look on my face, and for an instant I turn my head away.

“It’s a simple story to tell. I can sum it up in a few words.”

She looks at me. And waits for the words.

“I was young, handsome, and wealthy. I had all the girls I could ever wish for. In the city of Palermo I had become a minor celebrity. During my last year in law school, I fell in love with the wrong girl. A girl that Turi Martesano’s nephew had already decided was the girl for him. Turi Martesano was a big gun in the Mafia. They warned me that I was running a big risk. But I thought I was untouchable, that I was protected by the shield of my father’s political power.”

I can’t help but smile at the thought of how naïve I was, and how helpless.

“She was in love, as much as I was. Perhaps more, because if I’d had any idea what was going to happen to me, I would have run away immediately. We went on dating. One night, on my way home, I was grabbed by three men. They threw a hood over my head and shoved me into a car.”

I give her time to conjure up images corresponding to my story. She certainly has experiences in her own past that should help her do so.

“They took me to a place. I think it was a farm. I could smell the countryside. I heard the voice of the man talking. A rough, gravelly voice, he told me to hold still, that if I was good he wouldn’t hurt me as much, and he kept telling me Bravo! Bravo!… Then they pulled down my trousers and he sliced off my dick.”

Even I am forced to use my imagination for this part. There was a hood over my head. All I saw was blackness. I remember the yellow flash of pain before my staring eyes.

“Then what happened?”

“They threw me out of the car in front of my house, an isolated villa at the beach, at Mondello. I was immediately sent to a private clinic for treatment, where I had emergency surgery and was cared for in conditions of absolute discretion. Absolutely no one was to know that they had kidnapped Amedeo Sangiorgi’s son and cut his dick off.”

My voice must sound to her the same way it sounds to me.

Choked and still filled with disbelief.

“Once I recovered, they transferred me to Rome and I was put into a psychologist’s care. To come to terms with the trauma, they said. The sessions did one useful thing: they made me suspicious. It had all been too well orchestrated to have been a lucky chance. The way they dropped me off in front of my house, the fact that I was given such prompt medical care, the fortuitous presence of the right surgeons in the clinic, as if my father had been warned in advance of what was going to happen.”

I look her in the face again. I’ve watched as this woman killed people in cold blood. But now there’s a bottomless grief and pity painted on her face.

“And in fact that’s pretty much what had happened. He confirmed that to me himself. He knew, but he lacked the courage to do anything about it. Or there was nothing he could do, which doesn’t really change matters much. By this point he was in too deep and he was too determined to climb to the top of the ladder of power.”

I allow her to reflect on the tragic irony of the whole story. The fact that, of all the files, she should have chosen to put into my hands the one that dealt with my father. The fact that the only person who could have helped Senator Amedeo Sangiorgi to recover a dossier that he’d fought so ferociously to track down was his son, whom he’d sacrificed to the laws of the Mafia.

“That’s why I ran away. That’s why I lay low and used a fake name. I took diction lessons to conceal my accent. I was afraid of the world, and I felt only fear and contempt toward everyone. Toward other men, who could be what I could never hope to be again. Toward women, who had the power of exciting me but not of satiating me.”

She looks at me in silence. There’s not much left to say. And what little there is, it’s up to me to say.

“And so, in memory of the words spoken that night, Bravo was born. A pimp.”

“Did you ever find out the name of the man who mutilated you?”

I smile. Despite the effort it costs me.

“Certainly. He was a professional killer hired for the occasion. I met him again in Milan. He’d risen through the ranks, and now he was a gang boss. But I had a clue. I remembered his voice. He didn’t have any way of recognizing me, not even my face, because my head was covered with a hood.”

“What ever happened to him?”

“He died in San Vittore Prison. He was killed by another prisoner in the exercise yard.”

It takes her a second to make the connection. But she gets it almost immediately.

“Did that prisoner by any chance live somewhere near Quarto Oggiaro before winding up in prison?”

My silence is equivalent to confirmation. And it strikes me as the right moment to venture a small additional observation about myself.

“As you can see, I’m no better than you are.”

My story is done. As I’d promised her, it wasn’t long. There will be other stories for both of us. But each of us will experience them on his or her own. Now there’s not much left to say, only a short time left to spend as best we can.

Carla stands up.

“I think I’d better go rejoin my boys. Officially I came in here to thank you properly while they took a dip in the ocean. But now I have to go.”

I accompany her to the door. Her voice stops me short.

“Now let me ask you a question. The same question you asked me. How are you?”

“I have a woman. Just one. I let her see other men. But not for money.”

I open the door for her. I follow her down the short hallway.

“I’ve wondered more than once what that life would have been like.”

“What life?”

“Working for you.”

We walk through the door and we’re in the lobby. Beyond this wooden panel is another world. The world of people who don’t know and in this case would certainly prefer not to.

“I told you, one day in my apartment, when you asked me to bring you into the business. It’s not a road you can’t come back from. But if you do, you’ll be bringing some unpleasant memories with you.”

“Who doesn’t have them already?”

“Right, who doesn’t?”

A few more steps and we’re outside, on the patio from which we have a view of the beach and the sea, abloom with colorful sails. From here, it’s impossible to identify Paul and Malcolm McKay, but I feel certain that down there somewhere they’re enjoying themselves like any father and son on holiday. And they’re waiting for a wife and mother whom they know as Luisa to rejoin them.

I’m tempted to ask her her real name. But I refrain.

Whatever that name might be, to me she’ll always have just one name: Carla.

Carla Bonelli.

Just as we’re about to say good-bye, Pilar catches us by surprise. She must have left the Nissan Patrol in the parking lot and walked around the building, so I didn’t see her coming. She stops just a step or two away.

She looks at us and, with the instinct that all women seem to possess, examines us.

“Pilar, this is Mrs. McKay. She’s going to be our guest at the resort village with her husband and son for a couple of weeks.”

Pilar walks over. The two women shake hands and study each other the way that only women know how to do. Then Carla … no,
Luisa
—decides that the time really has come to get back to her family.

“Have a good day, Mr. Sangiorgi. Thanks very much for your kind help. You have a good day too, Pilar.”

Without waiting for a reply, she turns and walks away, with a gait that has lost none of its grace. I follow her with my gaze as she stops to take off her shoes and then walks off barefoot across the sand.

Pilar’s voice summons me back to her side.

“That woman likes you.”

I realize that she was watching my eyes, without understanding what was reflected in them. Certainly a number of things, all of them easy to misunderstand.

“Are you going to leave me for her?”