Oh well, nobody lives forever.
Now Tano and I are alone. I go back to my chair. He puts his hands behind his head and draws his own conclusions.
“So, for you this Laura’s freedom is worth all that money.”
“That’s right.”
He looks at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.
“You’re a smart guy. You’re no chicken. From the way you talk, I can tell you’re educated. You have a nice appearance. Are you ambitious, too?”
This sounds like the preamble to a job offer. Which I tactfully do my best to avoid.
“Sometimes ambition can take you on some strange rides, in the backs of certain cars and inside certain coffins. Plus, I’m allergic to flowers.”
Tano Casale bursts out laughing.
“And you’re a philosopher too. Happiness comes to him who settles for less.”
This time I put a ceremonious smirk on my face.
“Or you could put it another way. He who is happy to settle for less lives well and much longer.”
The man sitting across the desk from me seems satisfied, both with me and with the turn of events.
“Outstanding. I guarantee that Salvo won’t bother your girl anymore. As for the rest of it, give me the time to put together the money and then we’ll complete this operation. I’d be just as happy if it was you supervising it, even though, for obvious reasons, I’d assign a trusted colleague to work alongside you.”
I pull a ballpoint pen out of a cup and jot down the phone number of the answering service I use on a notepad lying on the desk. I push it across the desk to him.
“You can get in touch with me any time of the day or night at this number.”
Tano stands up. This signals an unspoken dismissal. I stand up too and reach out to grip the hand he extends to me.
“Now, if you want to go take a stroll around the room in there, I’ll have them give you a handful of chips, just so you can’t say we sent you away empty-handed.”
I put another aspect of my life onto the scale.
“Thanks. But I don’t gamble.”
“Smart boy. There are plenty smarter ways to burn up your money.”
We emerge from the office and into the warehouse. While I was busy negotiating with Tano Casale and getting myself beaten up by Tulip, more people have shown up. Now the roulette table is almost completely concealed by the crowd of male and female players clustering around it. For the same reason, I can barely see the craps table, and I notice that they’ve set up another blackjack table. This line of business must bring in a fortune. A safe and risk-free source of revenue, every night on earth that God grants us. The world is teeming with people willing to lose the deed to their house at a roulette table. Moreover, in the specific case in question, alongside the sheer thrill of gambling is the added charge of doing so in a way that’s against the law. Though I’m pretty sure that Tano, as far as that goes, has arranged for all the necessary protections.
Everything that needs to be said between us has been said. The boss waves his hand good-bye and goes over to Menno, who’s facing the croupier at the head of the roulette table. I see Micky excuse himself from his conversation with an elegant laughing blond woman; he leaves her and walks over to them. They chat. Then my blond friend heads in my direction, while the other two leave through a door in the far wall, followed by a third man who must be their bodyguard.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
The voice, with a heavy Milanese accent, comes out of nowhere. A second later I’m looking at Daytona, large as life, wiping his face with a handkerchief. He must be on a bad losing streak. When he’s sweating at the card table it means that the goddess of fortune has taken off her blindfold, but only to hand it to him so he can mop his brow.
I doubt it would be wise to tell him the real reason for my presence at the Township of Opera Scrapyard Casino. I come up with a wisecrack, just to take his eye off the ball.
“I dropped by to make sure you didn’t gamble away your underwear, too.”
“Then you got here too late. I lost my undies a while ago, along with everything else.”
To judge from his red face, he must have dropped quite a bundle. But I don’t think he’s hit bottom yet. I can see the watch is still there on his wrist.
As we are exchanging these wisecracks, Micky comes over to join us. He and Daytona know each other, though it’s not like they’re so fond of each other that they’re about to jump up and do the flamenco on one of the tables. In fact, Micky talks to me and ignores Daytona entirely, as if I were there alone.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s okay. I want to thank you.”
“For what? When you want to leave, let me know.”
Daytona is an openly avowed loser, with regularly thwarted ambitions of moving up to the next level. He saw the scene with the blond woman. He knows that Micky is one of Tano’s favorites, so he unfurls the servile tone of voice he uses when he wants to ingratiate himself with someone.
“If you want to stay here, I’ll be glad to drive Bravo back.”
Micky looks at him and then looks at me. He cocks an eyebrow.
“Is that a problem for you? I have something to do and it would sure help me out.”
“No problem.”
“Great. See you around.”
He leaves us and swoops back down on his prey. When all is said and done, this too is a fair game. I give and in exchange I am given. The young man is offering for sale exactly what that blond woman wants. Events will determine whether the price was too high or too low. And in the final analysis, as always, it’s their own fucking problem.
Daytona rubs his hands together, with the crafty look of somebody who’s just pulled off a considerable public relations coup.
“So, shall we go?”
I head out the door I came in by. He follows me with his swaggering gait, belly protruding from the dark blue jacket that once fit him. We get outside and the guard standing watch observes us as we pass by him, without changing expression and without offering a greeting.
After we walk a few steps together, Daytona utters a phrase in a low voice, to keep from being overheard.
“With all the money we left on the table, he could at least have said buona notte.”
I stop and give him a look.
“Don’t try to drag me into a first person plural that has nothing to do with me. With all the money that you left on the table, is what you mean.”
Daytona’s face lights up, as if he’d suddenly remembered something.
“Speaking of money…”
He pauses to unlock the Porsche. He gets in and waits until I’m sitting beside him before he continues.
“You remember that pine fiece of ass that I took upstairs this morning, the one we picked up in front of the Ascot and that thanks to you cost me a bundle of cash?”
The one that we picked up?
That’s what I think, but I say nothing and wait. Daytona continues, working himself up. “A fantastic body. A figure to knock your eyes out. A couple of tits straight out of science fiction and an ass that talks, eloquently. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, her ass has even given a few interviews.”
He starts the engine. He puts the car in gear and pulls out toward the front gate.
“If you want to give her a whirl, believe me, you won’t regret it. She already told me that if I want to see her again I’ll have to up the rate, so she can go fuck herself as far as I’m concerned. But I think that she’d be willing to give you a discount. Wait a minute…”
He slips two fingers into the breast pocket of his jacket and extends a little sheet of paper folded in half to me.
“Here, she even gave me her phone number. Give her a call, take some good advice from a miserable idiot like me.”
I unfold the wrinkled little piece of paper and look at it. In the half-light inside the car I can just make out a number written in a feminine hand. I crumple it up and drop
it into the ashtray. Daytona observes and objects.
“You know, you’re making a mistake. That girl is first-class.”
I dismiss the subject with a few words, and I hope they’re definitive.
“I know plenty of first-class girls. One more won’t change my life.”
All the same, as we pull out of the gate, I feel a strange sense of annoyance at Daytona’s appraisals of the girl. And as we bounce along the unpaved road on our way back to blacktop, I find myself thinking that our Carla turned out to be a quick study. Then, for the rest of the trip, in spite of my driver’s senseless chatter, I can see her face before me and in my mind I hear those words over and over.
If it was you, I’d do it for free …
6
The taxi comes to a halt near the front door of the Ascot Club and my stomach is doing somersaults. The cabbie, a hippyish-looking guy with long hair and a reddish beard you’d expect to see on a hobo, has a face that reminds me of Chewbacca, the hairy first mate from Star Wars. I couldn’t say whether the Wookiee drove his spaceships the same way. But one thing I can say is that we definitely made at least two or three leaps into hyperspace on the journey from Piazza Napoli to here.
I give him the fee he demands even though, as usual, the total doesn’t seem to square with the readout on the meter. There are taxi drivers in Milan who’d be willing to ask you for a special late-night supplemental fee in the middle of the day just because you’re wearing sunglasses, and charge you extra for luggage just because you’ve got a wallet in your back pocket. I watch him pull out safe and sound, even though I feel like telling him to go fuck himself.
But it’s a nice evening, I’ve just solved a problem, I’m alone, and I’m in precisely the right mood for being alone.
Just a short while before, after we entered the city of Milan and as we were driving along Via Giambellino, Daytona suddenly stopped his freewheeling talk of women, cars, and the large amounts of money that are always just about to come to him. Today he’s expecting a payment from a certain Rondano, his insurance agent, to be specific.
I knew what he was thinking and the question that was spinning in his head. It’s just that I expected it much earlier. At last he opened up, in a seemingly careless voice, continuing to watch the street with a zeal that seemed perhaps excessive.
“That’s a nice thing Tano Casale’s put together, eh? He must pull money out of that place hand over fist.”
“Yeah.”
I’m all laconic, he’s finally explicit.
“Do you have any deals under way?”
“I’d have to say no.”
“You know, I saw you come out of his office with him and I thought…”
I interrupted. Sliding into a jocular scolding tone just so I could steer the conversation away from thin ice.
“Daytona, don’t do too much thinking. Extensive experience shows that it’s not something you’re particularly good at.”
If Daytona gets it into his head that I have connections with Tano, I’ll never get him off my back. His attitude with Micky told me everything I needed to know. He took the dressing-down with some resentment.
“Ah, go yuck fourself. If that’s your way of trying to tell me it’s none of my business, then you can just keep your own…”
Yes, I’ll keep my own secret forever.
I felt like answering him in the Italian voice of Greta Garbo. Instead, I decided to minimize and change the subject with a plausible explanation, to keep him from sticking his nose in my business in the future. Most of all, I was sick of being questioned.
“I had an errand to do. I was there as a messenger, nothing more. Once I delivered the message, the relationship was over. No deals under way, as you put it.”
Whether or not that convinced him, the topic was closed. And with it, any interest Daytona might have had in me. Which was certainly one of the reasons he offered to drive me back to town in the first place.
This time, when he asks the next question, he turns to look at me.
“Where did you park your car?”
“At the Ascot.”
Standard expression of disappointment.
“Do you mind if I leave you at the taxi stand, down at the end of this street? I have to be someplace and I’m already running late.”
As long as I’ve known him, Daytona almost always has to be someplace. I’m pretty sure that these aren’t places where anybody does anything commendable. One of these days he’ll go directly from one of those places to a high-security prison without even transitioning through the street, as Godie would say. Placing his index and middle fingers on the victim’s throat like a pair of scissors.
Tac! Got you! You have the right to remain silent.
I wave a hand dismissively.
“Don’t worry about it, drop me off wherever you want.”
“Bravo, you’re a friend.”
A friend. I feel like laughing out loud. After a certain time of night and a certain threshold of alcohol and cocaine, it’s the easiest thing in the world to find friends in Milan. You wind up in certain clubs, hanging out with a crowd that, taken all together, accounts for seven hundred years in prison, tossing around the word friend, distilled directly from the coca leaf. In reality, nobody’s anyone’s friend, not even their own. So it’s the commonest thing imaginable, the next morning, for someone to wake up with a terrifyingly ugly woman asleep next to him and not even remember her name. She’s just anyone, a woman picked up at random, out of desperation, when loneliness and booze conspire to shut your eyes tighter than a roll-down security shutter.
I got out of Daytona’s Porsche and I headed over to the column of two or three taxis waiting hopefully in line, without realizing I was about to step into the Millennium Falcon. Which by now must have reached Warp Nine and must be hurtling past the San Siro Stadium on its way out of town.
* * *
I’m just about to pull open the driver’s side door of my Mini when I see Giorgio Fieschi walk out of the club along with a pair of fellow actors. I hear their laughter as they climb into a green Renault R4 and head off in the direction of Piazza Buonarroti, away from where I’m standing. I envy them. They’re young and they’re talented. I hope they understand that this means they have the world in the palms of their hands. At the same time, I turn my mind with pleasure to Laura and her sense of duty. Her current crush on the cabaret artist has been filed away for later, with reference to her appointment tomorrow morning. In part because 70 percent of a million isn’t a bad fee for one hour’s work.
The rest is my commission.
I slip my key into the lock. Someone comes up next to me. I hear the voice, I recognize the face, and I see the gun—all at the same moment. But Tulip’s expression is the single most significant factor, the one that puts the worst light on the likely outcome of the night.
“Ciao, pimp. As you can see, we meet again.”
I know why he’s here. And the fact that he’s here means that his sense of thug’s honor is much stronger than his fear of his boss. I forced him to submit to a humiliation that he can’t get out of his mind. Right this second, Laura and Tano mean nothing to him. This is between him and me. Nothing I could do or say would change the situation.
So I say nothing and look at him.
He’s unruffled. He’s past his anger: it’s been replaced by the calm of determination. And I consider that to be a very negative additional wrinkle.
“What’s the matter, you swallow your tongue? How come?”
Out of the blue, in the silence of the street, a backhanded slap cracks out as it makes contact with my right cheek with the power of a gunshot. My ear starts whistling. A constellation of tiny yellow dots begins bobbing in front of my eyes like so many gnats.
“Just wanted to show you that I still have the courage to come take care of a piece of shit like you in person. Get moving.”
He waves his pistol in the direction of Piazzale Lotto. I get moving, looking around me without seeming
to. But he notices.
“There’s nobody around, you little pussy. Don’t worry. It’s just you and me.”
He’s right. The show at the Ascot has been over for a while and the parking lot is practically empty. This evening not even the two streetwalkers who usually loiter around near the club are out. Which I don’t like. Which I don’t like one little bit.
We reach a Citroën CX, oversize and slightly decrepit. Still keeping a safe distance, he rummages through his jacket pockets and then places the keys on the roof of the car.
“Here, you drive. Smooth as silk, and no funny business.”
I pick up the keys, get behind the wheel, and start the engine. I look over and he’s sitting next to me. Tulip’s years of experience ensure that in all these various movements, the muzzle of the pistol has been invariably trained on my belly.
I sit in silence and wait.
“Take the Nuova Vigevanese.”
I pull out of the parking lot and drive in the direction he indicated. I wonder whether the expression on my face resembles that of Aldo Moro, in the photograph that has been published repeatedly in the newspapers over the past few weeks. I can’t expect to be the subject of the intense concern of the entire nation, nor can I expect a single word of intercession from anyone on earth. I don’t even think I deserve either concern or words of intercession. Unless there’s a miracle, I’m about to vanish into thin air and no one will ever come looking for me, since no one gives a crap what becomes of me.
We drive on in silence. The only thing I could try would be if we happen to cross paths with a police car. Still, I’m afraid that wouldn’t make much of a difference, as far as my abductor is concerned. From what I know about him and what I’ve been able to see with my own eyes, he must not be entirely right in the head. If he’s decided to cross the line and disobey a direct order from Tano, it means nothing can stop him now.
As if he’d just read my mind, he breaks the silence.
“Tano told me to leave the girl alone. He didn’t say anything about you.”
“I’ve got a deal pending with your boss and this will screw it up. He’s not going to like that.”