Gang of Lovers (12 page)

The clients were regulars, for the most part. They all seemed to know each other, launching jokes from one table to another. The rest were tourists or people drawn by the excellent reviews in specialty magazines.

“The food is very good here,” the fat man decreed as he wiped his mouth with an ivory cloth napkin. “And it doesn't strike me as the kind of place where you'd run into the criminals we're looking for.”

I took one last look at the diners. “Many of them are knee-deep in business and finance. You can't rule out the possibility that someone recognized Signora Pozzi Vitali.”

Max mimed clutching at straws. “One thing we can rule out with 100 percent confidence, though,” he said, gesturing around the dining room. “No one recognized the professor.”

We burst out laughing and just then the proprietor came over, accompanied by two ladies. “Laughter is always the best medicine,” he said; his tone was ambiguous enough that I found it vaguely offensive. “Would you mind if these two lovely maidens joined your table? Otherwise I'll be obliged to show them the door, and I'd be especially sorry to do so, since one of them is my wife,” he said, pointing to a woman who hastened to introduce herself as Martina.

“And I'm Gemma,” put in the other one. “The girlfriend.”

We helped them get seated, a little awkwardly because we would have preferred to be left alone.

The proprietor's spouse was a recapitulation of the restaurant itself in human form. Perfect, impeccable, charming, but not excessively so. Everything about her was measured. The other one was different, much more similar to the other women eating in the restaurant. She downed Martina's bubbly without asking permission, as if by habit. And she gulped her antipasto in just a couple of bites. Max and I were far too familiar with life's disasters not to notice the boundless sea of unhappiness in which this woman was drowning. Of the two, there was no mistaking the fact that Gemma was more perceptive and smarter. Martina seemed somehow lobotomized.

After the usual chitchat and remarks on how odd the weather had been that summer, a long silence descended. The two women, perhaps feeling guilty about having invaded our table, began sounding out our willingness to converse with them. When they told us that they often wound up sitting with strangers, given the fact that they ate at La Nena every night, the two of us suddenly turned talkative, and in just a few minutes both women were attentively studying Professor Di Lello's face.

Martina summoned her husband over with a wave of the hand. “Giorgio, honey, have you ever seen this gentleman?” she asked, handing him the photo.

“No, I'm afraid I haven't,” he said calmly and then fired off a sharp, specific question. “Are you two gentlemen from the police force?”

“No,” I replied.

“Then I can't understand why you would come to my restaurant and start showing that photograph around.” His tone of voice was not threatening, much less discourteous.

“Pure curiosity,” the fat man retorted brusquely.

Giorgio placed both hands on the shoulders of his wife and her friend. “Watch out for these two busybodies,” he joked before returning to his duties as a restaurateur.

Suddenly Martina decided to torture us by changing the subject to outlet stores. Not just one in particular, but all the outlets within a two hundred kilometer radius. By dessert I was ready to beg for mercy. Max, equally tested by the grueling ordeal, didn't ask for a second round of grappa.

“Did everything meet with your satisfaction?” the proprietor asked at the cash register.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Then I'll look forward to seeing you again. Come back whenever you like.”

In order to recover from our close encounter with that lunatic of a wife of his, we stopped to drink a beer. The evening was hot, the piazza was dotted with little café tables.

“Strange pair of girlfriends,” I noted.

“What the hell got into her? There was no way to get her to shut up or change the subject. And I didn't like her husband one bit. Did you see how he reacted when we showed the professor's photo? It was as if we were polluting his restaurant.”

“Maybe we made a mistake by not pushing the staff a little harder.”

“It would have just been a waste of time. Three more days and we'll be done with our culinary tour. Not that I've minded, the Lord only knows, but I think it's clear that our two illicit lovers didn't get themselves into trouble between the risotto and the chicken cacciatore,” Max concluded.

I'
d sniffed them out the second they set foot in La Nena. Then, when they'd pulled out the picture of that asshole, I'd had my proof. They weren't cops, nor did they come out of the private sector. They were mercenaries. What I didn't understand was how they'd managed to track me down. I immediately put in a call to Federico Togno, former carabiniere, former private detective, former perennially unlucky patron of the gambling dens of Northeastern Italy, former coke hound. He'd ruined his life for no particular reason because it wasn't worth a damn to him. His role in the world was to serve. I'd picked him up out of poverty and set him back on his feet a couple of years ago, and ever since he'd tagged along after me like a loyal lapdog. I'd secured him a house and even a wife, Maria José Pagliaro, a prostitute just as short on brains as he was; she was a pain in the ass left over from when I was forced to close up shop as a pimp. She'd decided, and not without good reason, that all her former colleagues had come to ugly ends, and she'd said that she was willing to do anything I asked if I'd spare her life.

I'd told her the truth. “Believe me, they're all fine, it's just that I sent them to work somewhere far away.”

“I don't want to go far away,” Maria José had whispered.

Even if she wasn't at all bad looking, I didn't know what to do with her. I'd screwed her a few times without enjoying it even a little. The only thing she was good for was as a wife, so I'd married her off to Federico.

“It's your job to make my little soldier happy,” I had instructed her. “Make sure his cock is slick and shiny and keep an eye on him for me. Once a month you'll come give me a full report.”

So I'd been able to rely on Federico with a certain margin of safety. I used him as a driver, bodyguard, and investigator for 3,000 euros a month. In the past, when I wanted information, I'd made use of other lowlifes with police ties, but he was just rotten enough and might bring me better results. Little by little I'd gotten him used to the idea that there were times when violence was necessary. A couple of broken bones, a break-in or two, a rape. When Maria José let me know that her husband had enjoyed those experiences, I assigned him his first killing. A nice, easy job. A Maghrebi immigrant who had decided to bother my customers by grabbing purses right outside the restaurant. The fifth or sixth time it happened, I made up my mind that taking him out was the only way to rid the city of that parasite. Federico was up to the challenge. A portico, a winter's night. Ali Baba was laying his last ambush when he was stabbed; the blade sliced through his right kidney.

After, I demonstrated my generosity, sending my hired killer and his wife on a ten-day vacation at a resort in Tunisia. That locale hadn't been chosen at random, but he'd failed to detect the irony in the concealed reference to the victim's place of origin.

That night I'd ordered him to tail those two assholes and now I was waiting for him to come back and feeling a bit anxious. It was getting late and I was in a hurry to find out as many details as possible so that I could react appropriately.

If I had been found out, others would soon be showing up, and certainly not to pay the kind of astronomical check I'd saddled those two with. That said, the looks on their faces when I'd gone over to their table had hardly indicated suspicion.

Some tiny nugget of evidence must have led them to La Nena, but the situation could still be considered well under control.

My henchman knocked at the restaurant door at 2:30
A.M.
“Sorry, Giorgio, but first those guys had a couple of beers out here in the piazza, then it took them forever to get to Padua. You know they get around in a Å koda that's old as the hills?”

“Once they got to Padua, where did they go?”

“They parked on Corso Milano. Then I saw them walk into an apartment building, at number 78.”

I was struck by the fact that they were living in the secret hideout of the two pathetic lovebirds. They seemed like natives of the Veneto, not outsiders: the fat man talked like a typical Paduan.

“I have to find out who they are, Federico. And fast.”

“I have their license number and a couple of pictures I snapped with my cell phone. I can ask Brigadier Stanzani for a favor; he's on duty in Padua. He's a dear friend of mine but he certainly doesn't stick his neck out for nothing.”

“How much does he want?”

From his smirk I understood it wouldn't be money. “A woman, cocaine . . . We're set up to make him happy.”

“A complete evening out. Dinner and then a whore in a luxury hotel.”

I thought how cute it would be to send Maria José. She had the necessary experience to make him enjoy all the delights of corruption. I resisted the urge. “You'll take care of everything, right?”

Federico nodded. “Tomorrow afternoon at the latest I'll let you have the first batch of information.”

I turned off the lights, activated the alarm, and finally went home. Martina and Gemma were dozing on the sofa in front of the TV, waiting to receive their instructions for the night. Usually I issued directives at dinner in the restaurant, but those two snoops had distracted me.

“Good night, Martina,” I said and she stood up, docile as always, gave me a kiss, and headed for the bedroom.

Gemma came to me and started unlacing my shoes. She'd been living with us for three years now; she'd always been my wife's best friend and I needed someone to keep Martina company. So, when it became clear to me that her husband running off with another woman to Salento had pushed her to the very edge, I started manipulating her. It was what she wanted. She put out very specific signals to that end. She was clearly letting herself go, at times with a kind of abandon. She wasn't a bit stupid and she'd read my intentions. She hated and loved me with the same intensity. She couldn't live without me or the life I offered her because I hadn't left her anything else. Martina never batted an eye, not even when I demanded that she have sex with Gemma. Neither one of them liked it, but for my wife it might as well have been an hour of spinning. For that matter, I was her love forever, the doting husband who made her happy. I deserved complete satisfaction even when I made the most unusual requests.

“Tell me all about those two,” I ordered.

“There's not a lot to tell. They showed us that picture, then your wife slayed them with her topic of the month: discount shopping.”

“How did they explain that strange request?”

“A friend of theirs who comes often to a restaurant in the center of town sang its praises and they just wanted to make sure that he'd been talking about La Nena.”

“What a bullshit excuse,” I thought to myself.

“Actually, though, I think I've seen him before.”

“Who?”

“That guy in the picture.”

“Where?”

“On TV. You know that show about missing people?”

Gemma never missed a chance to rev her brain and let me know about it. It was her way of letting me know she was well aware that I was a criminal.

I stroked her hair. “Did he come to La Nena?”

“A couple of times with a well-dressed lady.”

“You have a good memory,” I observed coldly.

“So I can be useful to you, as I have been in this case, King of Hearts.”

She called me that when she wanted to get a rise out of me.

“I'll bet you want to go to sleep and the last thing you feel like doing is giving me a blowjob.”

“That's exactly right.”

“Then I'm afraid that that's exactly what you're going to have to do, because that's what I want.”

“You can do better, King of Hearts.”

I look at my watch and sighed. I wouldn't be getting much sleep tonight. “You couldn't have picked a worse night.”

A hoarse sound emerged from deep in her chest, something that must have been meant as defiant laughter.

 

I got to the restaurant shortly before eleven, when people move from late breakfast to early aperitifs. The tables were occupied for the most part by middle-aged matrons, swathed in elegant skirt suits snatched up on the very first day of sales. I ordered a smoothie, made with organic bananas and chamois goat milk from the Alps, and sat down to read the local papers. Just then it was a real delight. The Veneto region had been thrown into an uproar by the arrest of a substantial number of politicians, businessmen, government administrators, and other peripheral figures, on charges of belonging to an honest-to-goodness criminal conspiracy designed to milk the area's taxpayers of their hard-earned cash. Millions and millions of euros worth of bribes had been pocketed in exchange for a piece of the usual major public works. Money that had wound up in Croatia and Dubai, invested in lavish villas and large-scale developments.

I knew all about it. The attorney and member of the Italian parliament and even, for a brief interval, cabinet minister Sante Brianese, who'd been looking after my interests since I'd landed in Veneto, had persuaded me to invest two million euros in the construction of a skyscraper in the emirate of Dubai. Money I'd sweated to lay my hands on, which he decided to cheerfully pilfer because he assumed I'd be grateful for the opportunity. I'd been forced to flex my muscles and make life difficult for him. He'd fought back by tossing me into the arms of the Palamara
'ndrina
, or clan. Another unsuccessful attempt that had forced him to surrender and give back his ill-gotten gains.