Gang of Lovers (18 page)

“Get me some help, Marco,” Max spurred me on in a faint voice, and I finally reacted.

“Of course, of course,” I stammered as I rummaged for my cell phone. “Don't you worry, you'll see, everything will turn out fine.”

“That's what they say in the movies, in real life that's all just bullshit,” he retorted, exasperated, before losing consciousness.

“There, now he's dead,” I thought to myself as I did my best to get an operator at the emergency hotline to understand me as I frantically told him what had happened.

A three-man squad car showed up first. “It looks like he's still alive,” said one police officer, as the other two checked my ID and searched me.

“So what happened?” asked the squad chief.

“Some guy. He wanted to rob us,” I lied. “Then for no reason at all he just started shooting.”

The third cop started peppering me with questions until I lashed out. “You leave me alone,” I shouted, pointing at Max. “Can't you see how badly he's hurt?”

The cop grabbed me by the collar. “If there's any chance of catching him, it's right now, while he's trying to get out of the area,” he hissed at me. “But we need to know who we're looking for.”

I shot a glance at Max, flat on the ground, motionless, and I took a deep breath. “His face was covered up, he was dressed in dark clothing,” I started to tell him. “He demanded our money, he spoke Italian, I didn't see him shooting because my friend protected me. He shielded me with his body, you get that? He got between me and the shooter and took the bullets himself, now do you see?”

The policeman finally realized I was in a state of shock. He went back to the squad car and placed a call to headquarters. Max was still unconscious, but the cop who was crouching beside him kept checking his jugular and continued to reassure me that Max was still with us. I believed him, more or less. I still had Marielita before my eyes, the way her life fled through her lips in the blink of an eye. I'd loved her too, and once we'd even wound up in bed together, but I'd never had the courage to say that to my partner. Maybe he'd guessed but had decided to let it slide: even the strongest friendships can crumble under the weight of words.

Marielita was a woman who was easy to fall in love with. She was a street musician who had been the fat man's eyes and ears for all the years when he was in constant hiding because there was a warrant out for his arrest. I'd never dreamed of stealing her away from him; sex with her had simply been a chance occurrence, if a wonderful one, an affair I was certain would have no aftermath. But her death had left a legacy of questions without answers. At last the siren announced the arrival of medical assistance. After a few minutes Max was strapped to the ambulance gurney and I found myself sitting beside him, observing the pallor of his face in the cruel light of the ambulance's interior, a light that picked out every detail.

“How is he?” I asked in a thin voice.

“We're almost there,” a woman replied in a weary tone; she was bundled into a uniform that was a couple of sizes too large.

Max was admitted as a code red, which meant he was in critical condition, and I found myself sitting in a waiting room packed with people. As I watched a girl talk on her cell phone, updating her family on her grandmother's condition, it dawned on me that I still hadn't told anyone what had happened. Actually, there was only one person I'd have wanted to tell, one person whose help I desperately needed, but Beniamino's cell phone was out of range or turned off.

I called Christine Duriez on a number that we'd agreed was only to be used in case of an emergency; I was pretty sure that she was in contact with old Rossini, who had been living the life of a retired robber from the sixties since Sylvie's death. France was the perfect place for that.

She picked up on the ninth ring. “
Oui, Marco
?”

“Someone shot Max. He's in surgery now.”

“Where are you?”

“In Padua. Where's Beniamino?”

“Not here.”

The woman from Marseille hung up. She'd pass the message on and there was no point wasting time in idle chitchat.

Right then I needed to drink Calvados, listen to blues, and take a few hours off. None of that would be happening though, and the cold fluorescent lights made it seem as if I was already at the morgue.

I got up to find a place outside where I could smoke a cigarette and walked straight into three guys who were heading for me wearing the pissed-off expressions you tend to get when you've just been rudely rousted out of bed.

“DIGOS intelligence service. You're coming with us to police headquarters,” they announced.

“DIGOS?” I repeated, aghast. “What do you guys have to do with what happened tonight?”

The three of them exchanged a glance. The sharpest looking member of the trio finally spoke.

“You and the guy clinging to life in the other room have served time for terrorism and now you're surprised that we came down to pick you up?”

I lost it. “Don't you dare talk about my best friend like that, you fucking asshole.”

They shoved me against the wall until I was motionless. “Do you want us to put you up on charges of resisting arrest and insulting a police officer?”

I shook my head. “No, but can't we put this off till tomorrow? I need to be here in case Max needs me.”

“Don't worry about that. He's in good hands. The Italian state guarantees medical assistance of the highest quality even to complete pieces of shit.”

I couldn't hold my tongue. “Then as usual you guys have nothing worry about.”

The youngest and beefiest threw a punch to my stomach that rid me of any further desire to trade wisecracks with them. We resumed the conversation at police headquarters, in an interrogation room that hadn't seen a broom in quite a while.

“So have you decided it's time for a revolution again?” asked the guy who had hit me.

“No.”

“Did you come back to settle some accounts with your little comrades, or maybe to lay your hands on the organization's treasury, and your friends decided it was time to shoot you?”

“No.”

“Have you become Muslims? Are you in contact with ISIS?”

“No.”

“And yet you've been to Beirut. Maybe you just had a chat with Hezbollah while you were there.”

“No.”

I kept replying mechanically until that farce ended and they let me go. A little while later the door swung open and Campagna came in. He didn't deign to look at me, but asked the DIGOS officer who was the chief of the trio to step outside with him for a moment.

Then Inspector Campagna took me by the arm and led me to his office.

“They received a tip,” he began as he unwrapped an energy bar.

“Who did?”

“My colleagues over at the DIGOS. Their informant claimed that you'd gone back into business as full-time revolutionaries.”

“This has Pellegrini's fingerprints all over it,” I thought to myself before shrugging and saying: “I did a seven-year sentence for letting some guy sleep on my couch one night. Just one very unlucky night. I've never been interested in politics.”

“I know that. But your friend marches to the beat of a different drum.”

“He's been out of the game for years.”

Campagna touched his head. “But certain ideas keep churning in his mind.”

“It's news to me if they've made it a crime to dream of a better world.”

“Now don't start busting my balls with your endless tirades about freedom of belief. You make me sick,” replied the cop as he chewed up the energy bar in disgusting fashion.

Then, as he usually did, he changed the topic. “So it was a robbery, you say?” he asked with a snicker.

“That was the impression I got,” I replied cautiously.

“Certainly, you have to admit that coincidences can be crazy sometimes,” he went on, openly amused. “In the morning DIGOS gets a tip about you and that same evening someone tries to take your wallets.”

I sighed. “Well, I could hardly have told him that we were sticking our noses into a kidnapping.”

“There are lots of things you can't say, Buratti.”

I changed the subject. “What did you say to make them let me go?”

“Cop stuff,” he replied. “Details that you don't need to know because, in any case, you're still a criminal to be prosecuted. I'm seriously considering dedicating my time and energy to putting you behind bars for a good long time.”

“You're starting to annoy me,” I retorted drily.

“There hadn't been any gunfire in Padua for a while,” Campagna persisted. “Brawls between gangs of dope dealers are an everyday occurrence. They massacre each other with broken bottles, with crowbars. Every so often there's a knife, but they set firearms aside for special occasions, because they're noisy and because the cops don't like them.

“But now you two assholes show up for a nice, discreet investigation, and in less than a month someone decides to shoot the two of you dead.”

“That doesn't mean that we've broken the law in any way,” I retorted, immediately regretting the bullshit I'd just spouted.

The cop reacted immediately, throwing a penholder with the Padua team colors on it straight at me. “Don't push it,” he admonished. “You used me and then went out on your own, concealing information from me, and as a result we still don't know if your partner's going to survive.”

I raised my voice. “You're the one who told me you couldn't go any further. Obviously, we scared someone so badly that they decided it was worth killing us, but I couldn't tell you who. I haven't kept anything from you.”

“Bullshit,” he hissed. “You lie with every breath. If you won't talk, I can't help you.”

I didn't have the slightest intention of talking. Those two bullets lodged in Max's body had irretrievably altered the trajectory of that case. I threw open my arms. “You have to believe me, all we did is ask around.”

“Who did you ask?”

I decided to bring him up to speed on what he was bound to find out anyway. “Brigadier Stanzani, who told us the name of his client, a certain Federico Togno. Who in turn explained to us that it was a regrettable misunderstanding, the result of a mistake in the transcription of a license plate number.”

“Bullshit,” the cop rapped out. “He asked for information about Max the Memory too, and he doesn't even own a car. Togno provided Brigadier Stanzani with a picture he took with his cell phone and in your file there are plenty of shots of the two of you together. What else?”

“That's it.”

“So you're trying to convince me that the key figure is this Federico Togno?”

“Maybe he's somebody else's henchman.”

“There was a time when I wanted to get out of this business,” Campagna started to tell me, looking out the window as dawn began breaking through the night, “and move to Berlin to follow my dreams: I wanted to open an official embassy for the Venetian
tramezzino
, the best sandwich on earth because it's the softest and the most flavorful. The
tramezzino
contains the quintessential flavors of this land.

“I'd already designed the sign with the name in a type that merged with the silhouette of a gondola. But most importantly, I'd already persuaded my wife and daughter to change everything, move to a new country, learn a new language. And then Wikipedia ruined everything.”

I couldn't believe that Campagna had decided to trap me in his office to tell me another one of his nutty stories. “How?” I asked, trying to get him to come to the point.

He held up the index and middle fingers of his right hand. “For two reasons. First, the
tramezzino
isn't Venetian at all, but was first served in a bar in Turin in 1925. There was little or nothing about it that was original, because it was really just an interpretation of the English tea sandwich.”

“And the second reason?”

“The name
tramezzino
was invented by D'Annunzio. And frankly I've always thought he was a pain in the ass.”

“I'm really sorry about the bad hand that fate dealt you, but I can't quite see what the fuck it has to do with me.”

“It means that you told the cops that it was a robbery, but you forgot that I work armed robberies, so now the case is mine. I'm going to be on your ass from now on, with my boss's blessing.”

I sighed ostentatiously. “Can I go now?”

“You'll have to come back to sign the transcript of your interview, which I have no intention of bothering to write just now.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to the hospital to see Max the Memory?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'll come with you.”

“There's no need.”

He stood up and grabbed his jacket. “No one will even speak to you; you're not a relative and you know how things work here: as soon as they see two people of the same gender, they clam up, just for the fun of it.”

 

Campagna's badge worked miracles. I managed to get a glimpse of Max through a sheet of plate glass in the intensive care ward while a young female surgeon briefed me on his condition.

“The problem isn't so much with bullets—we removed those without complications—but rather your friend's extremely poor cardiac and metabolic condition. He had a heart attack while we were prepping him for the operation and we were forced to perform an angioplasty with the insertion of two stents.”

“Will he survive?” the cop asked.

“Yes, but it's going to take time,” the surgeon replied. Then she pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket; in it were the two bullets. She gave the bag to Campagna.

“.22 caliber. Just like the shells my colleagues found,” the inspector declared as soon as the doctor had left. “How far away was that guy when he opened fire?”