These Dark Things (20 page)

Pino had been fifteen when a special courthouse was built outside Palermo to try members of the mob. The televised trials captivated all of Italy. Pino went to Uncle Ricci’s to watch them on the television. It was better than a movie. Three hundred mobsters in cages. They screamed obscenities and threatened witnesses, pulling fingers across their own throats to illustrate their ill intent. One man, already long imprisoned, testified in a stylish blue suit.

The heroes were the Palermo investigating magistrates, who managed to gain convictions for over three hundred Camorristi. Within minutes of his return home from Rome, the lead prosecuting magistrate and his beautiful new bride were blown to pieces on the airport road, along with their police escorts. The funeral was televised too. A widow of a bodyguard addressed the crowds. She was a beauty, with black ringlets, no more than twenty-five. Grief gave her the bent aspect of an old woman. Yet she spoke courageously, pleaded with the mob. She called Palermo a “city of blood” and pleaded for reform. She begged and wept, exclaiming, “You won’t ever change!” She seemed on the verge of collapsing.

Thousands grieved with her, standing in the rain. They overflowed the piazza, their colorful umbrellas like flowers on the dark afternoon. Slowly the widow gathered courage, and she called for a new day when citizens would no longer be terrorized by the mob. It was at that moment that Pino declared he wanted to be a Carabinieri. Uncle Ricci smiled and patted him on the head.

“Are you crazy? They will be running things long after you and I are no more than a pile of bones.”

The second magistrate was killed soon after.

Years later, Pino had been sworn in. Annunziata and Uncle Ricci were there to witness it. At lunch after the ceremony, Uncle Ricci ordered a bottle of champagne, and Annunziata presented her nephew with an amulet, a special one, to protect him from the Camorra.

Now Pino said: “Uncle Tonio, make me a promise.”

“What, Pino?”

“If anything goes wrong for me in the next few weeks, I want you to leave Naples. Go visit your lady friend in Milan. Go on vacation. Just do it immediately, the moment you hear. Don’t wait, don’t pack. Grab the first train to wherever it’s going. When you get to another city, fly where you wish.”

Antonio looked concerned. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No, just get away—quick. Be safe. I couldn’t bear it if I brought you trouble.”

12

Vesuvius released a plume of black smoke, a squid shooting ink into the blue. Ferries arrived and embarked, the blast of their horns vigorous, then melancholy. The sound floated out, finished. The seagulls were oblivious. A few circled overhead, pale kites drifting on the thermal currents. Most were stationed inland, fattening up on the garbage piled everywhere.

For two weeks the garbage had lain in the streets uncollected. Each morning the street sweepers attempted to clear paths so people could get out to school or work, do their shopping and chores. But by dark the paths would be blocked again with bottles and cans and festering refuse in boxes, crates, burlap, plastic, cardboard. Mounds of it, high as walls, clogging cramped alleys and wide thoroughfares, large piazzas and compact
piazzettas
. The flowing ridges of garbage overwhelmed Naples, slowly decomposing into a magma of rot, a putrid sewage threatening to bury the city alive.

Priests had taken to setting burning incense by church doors and alongside pews to try to mask the smells, to no avail. Although the World Health Organization had sent shipments of surgical masks, nobody wore them, the Neapolitans instead preferring to feign indifference. But the garbage crisis was reaching critical mass. Cases of cholera had started to appear, as well as hepatitis C. The government was threatening to send in troops to deal with it, if the private carting companies wouldn’t. There were five of them. Four were Camorra firms run by
teste di legno
, straw men who fronted for the syndicate. None were touching the refuse until it had somewhere to go. The trash lay abandoned. Anyone who attempted to have it carted away by private means would be punished. The object lesson of the dead restaurateur who had attempted it hadn’t been lost on anyone. In the wide median of the Via dei Tribunali, under the free-standing medieval arches, rotting fruits and vegetables, carcasses of fish, and meat scraps lay next to fresh goods on sale.

Natalia could hardly believe what she was seeing. A shriveled woman exited her building, clutching a brown pocketbook and a tiny sack of trash. She placed it beside the stinking hill that nearly blocked her street. As she walked on, a neighbor heaved a bag from her window. It fell on the heap and burst open, scattering peels and diapers. The old woman ignored it but cursed the Camorra out loud.

Gypsies, hired to set fire to the wastes, used whatever flammables were at hand—gasoline, kerosene, lighter fluid, diesel fuel, packing materials, cardboard.… The air was filled with toxins. Naples looked like something out of Dante. The collusion of organized crime and political powers had failed and made the illicit collaboration oddly public and exposed.

Natalia walked through the ancient heart of her city, twenty-eight centuries old, and through what had been, at the time of Nero, an Egyptian neighborhood. At the corner of the Piazzetta Nilo, she passed the reclining statue of the bearded god Nile.
’O cuorpo ’e napule
, read the inscription. O body of Naples.

In spite of the trash bags piled up, the bookstalls were open, locals and tourists browsing. A distracted woman slapped her noisy little boy as she nibbled on sugarcoated almonds. Natalia had a weakness for these candies, sold in their flimsy paper cones.

Virginia Woolf greeted Natalia with a wide cat yawn as she opened the door to Mariel’s bookshop. The caramelcolored giant rubbed against her legs and leaped up on the sales counter to stroll across quite regally. Mariel had found Virginia W. abandoned when she took over the space. Her parents’ death had left her well off. She used her inheritance to open the bookstore.

The shop was plain: bookcases and fluorescent lights. The black-and-white terrazzo floor was the one touch of elegance—that, and Mariel herself. Mariel came out of the back office. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Mariel’s hair was in a fashionable bun, white cashmere sweater perfect, black cotton skirt, fat pearls. Natalia could still see the girl in her, stretched out on the chaise longue, reading. Mariel stepped to the door and locked it, slipping the
CLOSED
sign into place, then led Natalia back into the shop to a small sitting area. Lola was there, and a younger woman in yellow T-shirt and pants and gold high heels decorated with sequins. Bianca Strozzi, the queen of the contraband cigarette business in Naples. Natalia hid her surprise. Lola and her husband Frankie had been in Gambini’s camp forever.

Bianca Strozzi employed thousands, bringing in untaxed cigarettes by truck convoy from Puglia, cigarettes she bought in huge quantities directly from people working with the major cigarette companies. She didn’t trust banks and was rumored to lease storerooms stuffed floor to ceiling with U.S. dollars. Widowed young, she had stepped into her husband’s role in the Camorra and did what had come naturally to her as the daughter of a Camorra family who had grown up in Naples’s criminal subculture: she took over. Not unusual in the contraband cigarette trade. It was mostly populated by women buying, hauling, storing, selling tax-free “blondes,” as the haulers called them.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Bianca, taking the risk of extending her hand.

Natalia couldn’t slight her friend’s new friend, who had herself run a considerable risk arranging this meeting. She shook Bianca’s offered hand.

“Mutual.”

“I’ll get right down to it,” said Bianca. “We’ve leased the equipment, ships, and overseas landfill. We want to cut a deal with the mayor. Come Monday, we want to start hauling garbage.”

“The mayor will be delighted to hear it,” Natalia said. “The companies that hold the contract now have obviously abrogated their responsibilities and failed to perform. You’ll probably get a medal from the prime minister.”

And a bullet from Gambini.

“Here’s what we hope to get, too: police protection.”

Natalia could imagine the violence this might unleash on the city.

“It’s not unprecedented,” Bianca hastily added.

“No, I know, I know. You want your drivers and rigs escorted. The Army might even be here by then. I’ll certainly pass this to my superiors. It’s reasonable, I suppose.” Costly too, because it will certainly set off hostilities between Strozzi’s camp and Gambini’s. But the city was desperate to rid itself of the garbage and would undoubtedly embrace the possibility despite the inevitable clash.

Bianca nodded. Natalia didn’t state the obvious: Bianca Strozzi was challenging the prevailing order, shaking the tree. The dispute would be bloody.

“Why don’t you negotiate this directly with the mayor?”

“I don’t trust politicians—or men. They’re all for sale. Four hundred a week for a street cop. Four thousand a month for a connected cop’s information. A hundred twenty thousand American dollars and a man’s gold bracelet buys a court decision. Gambini’s even bought the Neapolitan Communists. Lola says you deliver and that you’re not for sale. Is that true?”

“So far, nobody’s come up with my price.” She smiled.

“I like you,” Bianca said. “I appreciate your help. Let me know if I can ever return the favor.”

With that, Bianca collected her handbag and pressed a speed-dial number on her mobile phone. As she strolled to the door, a four-door car pulled up and a thin woman stepped out carrying a raincoat with something rigid underneath it. Bianca slipped into the back seat. The thin woman closed the door and let herself into the front passenger seat. The car glided away.

“Have you heard?” Lola said. “Gambini is running for a seat in Parliament.”

“Perfect. His
galoppini
will certainly get out the right voters. As long as he holds his seat, he’ll have immunity from prosecution. And he won’t be lonely. There must be two dozen convicted legislators already there, and more than twice that number appealing verdicts or running out the statute of limitations on some infraction.”

“Or awaiting a pardon from a judge they’ve gotten to. Yeah, Gambini enjoys a good gimmick.”

“Speaking of which,” said Natalia, “what the hell are you doing with Bianca Strozzi? Your husband has worked for Gambini since he was a kid. Zazu isn’t going to take this challenge from Strozzi lightly, or anyone who sides with her.”

“Things aren’t so good between us and Gambini.”

It had to be serious for Lola to risk Gambini’s wrath. And Gambini’s hold had to be slipping, for Frankie and her to even think of switching their allegiance.

Natalia nodded. “Let’s hope he doesn’t see Bianca coming at him.”

Back at her office, she startled Colonel Donati with Bianca Strozzi’s proposal. He would pass it on to the prefecture and mayor immediately, he said, and added: “They just brought in your friend for an interview, by the way.”

“Friend?”

“The esteemed Professor Lattanza. Cervino and his partner have him in the Fish Bowl.”

Natalia climbed the flight of stairs up to the third floor and checked with the desk clerk to see what room they were in, then proceeded to the adjoining observation room. She pushed back the curtain on the one-way mirror. The grilling was already under way. There he was, Lattanza in all his glory, wearing a custom-made lavender shirt with hand-stitched cuffs and discreet monogram, hair freshly cut. Relaxed. She couldn’t bear to hear his dissembling and left the audio switch off.

Marco Lattanza pushed aside a lock of thinning hair with a studied gesture. The index finger came to the side of his forehead, indicative of deep thought, an attentive and courteous concentration on whatever point the two carabinieri were making. He shot his cuffs, fingers checking the gold cufflinks as he constructed his compelling narrative, explaining, man to man, why he’d lied about his whereabouts on the night Teresa Steiner died. He leaned in, fingers pinched together, then waved his open hand in emphasis, eyebrows momentarily arched as he decried the vindictiveness of his wife on discovering his infidelities with a young mistress.

Lattanza turned coy, playful, and outlined the shape of a woman with both hands. He laughed. The younger detective smiled. Marshal Cervino sat stony-faced. Lattanza looked down at his hands, contrite, and nodded rapidly. The hands flew up and out. What was a man to do?

Teresa Steiner pursued him, her professor. He did the only polite thing an Italian male could. But the relationship soon grew burdensome and so he ended it. Why would he have killed someone so young and lovely?

Lattanza looked confident and controlled. But the tiniest bit forced, his animation the slightest bit excessive. Marshal Cervino had sensed it too. Lattanza suddenly fell silent and still, a puppet with its strings cut. Interview over. Cervino began the interrogation.