The Night of Rome Page 12

  Her father had explained to her once and for all, when she was a little girl, the difference between a Gentleman and a VIP. And she had understood then and there why Gentlemen were necessarily leftists and VIPs veered right. They were on Ischia at the time, on the terrace of the family villa, with a breathtaking view of the Bay of San Montano. Her father had shown her the villa of Luchino Visconti. A Gentleman, not some ordinary VIP. And where do Gentlemen go, that is, those in search of beauty, men who are animated by an aristocratic detachment and precisely as a result of their disdainful attitude are more capable than anyone else of being in tune with the moods of the lower classes? To Ischia, certainly not Capri. There you are. The Locanda dei Briganti was the extreme Capri of a city that will never discover its own authentic, profound, unattainable Ischia. Because, all the VIPs you could ask for, but Gentlemen—aside from her, since she considered herself to belong to the category—not a one. Roman-style VIPs, no doubt about it. No matter which way you look at it, in this blessed city everything comes down to belly, tits, and glitter. Noise, excess, and boorishness. At last, Sebastiano, having finished his round of greetings, came over and sat down next to her. He was making an effort to act relaxed, but Chiara could sense some anxiousness in him. And what she was going to have to tell him wouldn’t improve the situation. She told him all about her meeting the night before with Polimeni. Sebastiano furrowed his brow.

  “I’d hoped it would go better. But the man has changed.”

  “Maybe he’s just jealous, Chiara.”

  “I thought I could . . . guide him. More or less the way you do with Alex, but . . . ”

  Sebastiano abruptly changed the subject.

  “What did Alex tell you about me?”

  “Maybe it would be quicker to ask, what didn’t she tell me.”

  “Well, she’s a sweet girl, no doubt about it.”

  “She’s suffered a great deal.”

  “She’s a real storyteller, believe me, you can’t believe half of what she says. Just for starters, her father’s a lord of the realm.”

  “But her unhappy childhood and all the rest?”

  “All made up. She can go anywhere she chooses by sheer right of inheritance. That’s Alex. But she likes you. Maybe next time she’ll introduce you to her longtime girlfriend.”

  “Ah, so she has a longtime girlfriend?”

  “Another aristocrat just like her.”

  Chiara heaved a weary sigh.

  “Well, now that we’ve thoroughly explored the topic of Alex and her posh little friends, is it clear to you that Polimeni might become dangerous?”

  “So what are you planning to do?”

  “I don’t know yet, Sebastiano, I don’t know. I need time. I just wonder if this isn’t one of those situations where what we need to do is knock over the table.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Trigger a crisis of confidence. Bring down Giardino. But it’s a risky move.”

  “A lot of the time the riskiest moves are the best ones, Chiara. But let me take a stab first. I’ve got an idea.”

  A man in his early forties, tall and fair-haired, appeared at their table. Sebastiano introduced him with a tight smile on his face. The unease grew more palpable, and it wasn’t just because of the conversation about Polimeni. Fabio Desideri performed a perfect hand kiss. Then he grabbed a passing waiter and ordered him to make himself available to Sebastiano and Chiara.

  “And tonight you’re my guests here. Don’t try to argue. My mind is made up.”

  Sebastiano let a few moments go by, then he excused himself and went off after the proprietor of the establishment. So his anxiety had something to do with that Desideri, Chiara concluded. Another figure from the indecipherable demimonde to which her association with Sebastiano was introducing her. People like Frodo and the human refrigerator at the DP club. This Desideri was wearing a Kiton suit and a Marinella tie. A would-be Neapolitan. But his manners and his look were in open contrast with an underlying vulgarity that Chiara had immediately caught a whiff of. All things considered, she preferred Sebastiano’s imperfection to the fakery of that . . . what was it they said in Rome? Coatto! Hoodlum. A cleaned-up hoodlum. She preferred Ischia, and Sebastiano, she told herself, polishing off that Bellini.

  Sebastiano followed Fabio Desideri to his office, and shut the door behind him.

  “I talked to Danilo.”

  “So?”

  “Well, frankly, Fabio, you shouldn’t have made him that offer. Am I wrong or did we have an understanding that first I was going to inform Samurai?”

  “You had that understanding. I didn’t. I do what I think’s best.”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t. You’re doing things you think are best a little too much these days.”

  “And you, my golden boy, aren’t Samurai.”

  Sebastiano came back to the table, grim-faced.

  “Everything all right?” asked Chiara.

  “Everything’s fine.”

  He was a bad liar. She brushed his hand with a protective gesture.

  “Can I be straight with you? This place is depressing.”

  “Then let’s get out of here.”

  In his eyes, Chiara glimpsed a flicker of gratitude.

  Men, frankly, are elementary animals, very easy to handle.

  Fabio Desideri waited for the punk kid and his icy female companion to vanish over the horizon, then he went out the tradesman’s entrance, crossed a courtyard, came to a low building, and knocked on an armored door. Bogdan opened up immediately. From inside the room came the excited voices of the esteemed guests. Bogdan escorted him into a vast room where, around an oval table, Rocco and Silvio Anacleti and the emissaries of the Mafia families of the South were eating oysters, drinking champagne, and smoking. Fabio tipped his head to one side and then started rotating it in a slight stretching movement. The time had come to lay down his ace. Upon his arrival, silence fell over the room.

  “I have a proposal I hope you’ll find appealing,” he began, with his usual sneaky half-smile.

  “Let’s hear it,” muttered Rocco Anacleti.

  “How much is Sebastiano demanding for getting you in on the jubilee? Thirteen?”

  The man sitting around the table exchanged troubled glances.

  “Fourteen? Fifteen?”

  More silence.

  “No, say it isn’t so. Sixteen?”

  Rocco Anacleti nodded. His grandson Silvio nodded. Everyone nodded.

  “Well, you listen to me. I say that number should drop to twelve. Sixteen’s not realistic. It’s strictly for pimps. And I say that all of us together, all of us together, understand me clearly, in the end, we’ll get to twelve. What do you think?”

  All hell broke loose. Fabio Desideri lit a cigarette and made a phone call.

  DANILO MARIANI’S HOME. NIGHT OF MARCH 19TH.

  The girl had a bored look on her face. Maybe we should add, a vaguely disgusted look. Danilo Mariani realized that in the last hour he hadn’t looked any higher than the marble line of her tits. Her magnificent tits. As fine as her ass, Lord knows, which in its utter perfection looked like something drawn by Milo Manara. He looked at the time on the iPhone sitting on the nightstand. Three in the morning. He ran a hand over his hairy belly, patting it like the head of a dog, and looked around for the cigarettes without finding them.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You seriously have to ask me?” she asked, getting up off the side of the bed and heading over to the vast wall of glass panes overlooking a 180-degree view of the luxuriant darkness of Piazza delle Muse. The heart of the Parioli quarter, a green terrace above northern Rome, was a spectacular symphony of distant shadows and lights. The silhouette of Monte Mario, the curve of the Tiber. Another city. The other Rome.

  “If I ask you, it’s because I don’t know. It see
ms like somebody drowned your kitten. If you want to snort another line, there ought to be some more left on the table.”

  “Of course, that’s what I need. But don’t you see what a mess you are these days? With all the coke you’re doing you can’t even get it up anymore.”

  “I was tired. Today wasn’t much of a day.”

  “Sure, you were tired. Forget about tired. You were dead. Or actually, your little buddy down there was dead.”

  “Fuck off. I work all day.”

  “Oh, you don’t even know what work is. You’ve never tried it.”

  “Well, listen to the string of horseshit this whore spews out. Listen, if you don’t like it here, you can beat it. You know how many sluts I can find who’ll do a better job of sucking me off than you do?”

  “You make me want to puke.”

  So what if he gave her a good hard smack, that mouthy bitch? Danilo grabbed his tactical crossbow off the nightstand. “Oh, right, good idea,” she cackled, “you might be able to hit the target using that.”

  “You forgot your panties,” he said, setting down the weapon.

  “You can keep them, as a souvenir. Use them to hang yourself, maybe.”

  Danilo sighed, deflated.

  “I love you, you know that.”

  He’d said it tenderly. His declaration caught her by surprise just as she’d reached the door. She stopped for a second and smiled, touched.

  “You want me to call you a taxi?” he shouted from the bedroom.

  “When you think you can get it up long enough to fuck me, give me a call, darling,” she said, closing the apartment door behind her as she left. And she smiled.

  Alone at last. Danilo jumped to his feet and walked away from the bed, naked, crossing the room and standing aghast in front of the bathroom mirror. Fuck, his pupils were the size of cherries, and his legs were rigid as a couple of boards. He’d already snorted three quarters of Fabietto’s gift pack. But at least he hadn’t betrayed Sebastiano. And Sebastiano would take care of Fabietto.

  As she left the elegant apartment building, the girl paid no attention to two men who crossed paths with her, courteously holding the street door open for her. The taxi had already arrived. The two men watched her leave and then slowly climbed the steps leading up to Mariani’s penthouse apartment. They rapped their knuckles against the door.

  Danilo dragged himself to the door, without bothering to turn on the light.

  “What did you forget, my love? Or did you miss me already?”

  He put on a world-weary smile, pulled open the door, and the only thing he remembered was the vicious, violent punch that smashed his lip and the taste of iron as his mouth filled up with blood.

  He opened his eyes again after a period of time he couldn’t calculate. Probably not long, but long enough to wake up on the set of a porn film.

  He was on his knees on the bed, and they’d tied him down to the four corners of that bed, wrists and ankles bound. He had something on his head that seemed like a hood, and in short order he realized that it was the black lace panties that his girlfriend had left him as a memento. Gagging his mouth was a wet towel from the bidet, knotted at the back of his head. The scene was lit up by two big floor lamps, which the two men had fetched from the living room, dragging them over next to the bed.

  “Oh-oh-oh, good morning, Signorina!”

  Danilo Mariani bit hard into the towel, feeling it scratch his tongue and the top of his mouth. The guy came around in front of his face. And that’s when he observed the ten letters tattooed, one on each of the fingers of both hands.

  F-R-I-E-N-D-L-E-S-S.

  The tattooed guy reached into a sort of fanny pack and pulled out a big vibrator. Danilo Mariani passed out again.

  What awakened him again was the stabbing pain of deep lacerations and the progressive sense of suffocation of a position he couldn’t remember ever having experienced before. He now lay on one side, his ankles and wrists bound together, in the reverse-arched position of incaprettamento, the classic Mafia execution method. And to complete the torment, a sheet tying both wrists and ankles to his throat.

  The man with the stubby hands was laughing. The other guy was taking pictures. Click. Click click. He went on taking them.

  His temples were throbbing frantically, his eyes were on the verge of bursting from the skyrocketing blood pressure.

  They untied him just an instant before it killed him. Or at least, that’s certainly what it felt like. And as he was vomiting mucus and bile onto the mattress, the two men went into the kitchen. They came back with an ice-cold bottle of champagne. They popped the cork with all the good-natured cheer of a surprise party. They drank from the bottle, wiping their mouths with a white Comme des Garçons shirt that they’d found in the clothes closet. Then they poured the rest of the champagne over the back of his neck.

  “Wake up, Signorina! And don’t get used to the treatment, eh,” they said in farewell.

  Then they headed for the door. Except the little guy seemed to change his mind. He retraced his steps. He leaned over the bed where Danilo Mariani lay, curled up in a fetal position. He leaned close to his ear.

  “Fabio doesn’t like it when people talk too much. Keep it in mind.”

  They walked silently down the apartment house staircase. They got in their car.

  The powerful-looking guy lit a cigarette.

  “Send those pictures and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  VI.

  FRIDAY, MARCH 20TH

  Saint’s Day: St. Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis

  ANACLETI VILLA. LA QUIETE CLINIC. AFTERNOON.

  Come in, come in, Sebastia’, we were expecting you, and our friends came to see us too . . . ”

  It’s just like one of those stupid jokes, thought Sebas­tiano, as he crossed the threshold of Villa Anacleti at La Roman­ina: So there’s a Calabrian, a Sicilian, and a Neapolitan . . . They were all there, the Calabrian, the Sicilian, and the Neapolitan. The whole crew, no one missing. And yet, he’d given very specific instructions to the Anacletis. This was supposed to be a private conversation. Rocco, the patriarch, had instead done just as he pleased. It was a clear signal, the umpteenth one. Samurai had been too indulgent with these miserable wretches. Or perhaps it was he who’d been too lenient.

  “A little raki, Sebastia’?”

  “Later, later.”

  “Some Vecchio Amaro del Capo? A Coca-Cola?”

  “I said later.”

  They were all sitting on a circular sofa from the Seventies, the fruit of who knows what prehistoric extortion practiced by the family. Rocco, the patriarch, at the center, next to him Silvio, the smartest grandson, not even grazed by the legal tempest that had dismantled the ancient group. Yes, too much generosity. Perri and Viglione, temporarily guests of the Italian prison system, had been replaced by a couple of retreads. Sebastiano distractedly memorized their names. Calabrian and Neapolitan is more than enough, when you’re nobodies. And those two were nobodies. As for the Sicilian, well . . . A middle-aged country cutthroat, wispy white hair, and sideburns from the wrong decade. He looked like he’d walked out of a gangster B movie, the ones from the old days. The Mafia, running short on young recruits, was calling its reservists for duty.

  “Well, Sebastia’?”

  He took all the time he needed, doing nothing but staring at them each with a contemptuous smile. To establish the distances, emphasize the pecking order. Then he pulled out his iPhone, swiped through his pictures until he came to the torture scenes of Danilo Mariani. He enlarged the picture of the builder bound hand and foot in the self-strangulation of the incaprettamento and then handed the device to Rocco Anacleti.

  “This is what Fabio Desideri did to one of our men. Hand it around, please, Rocco.”

  Rocco did as requested. Everyone looked and nodded their heads. No one seemed a bit impress
ed or surprised. When the iPhone was restored to him, Sebastiano went on with what he had to say.

  “I have to ask myself how such a thing could have happened,” he said, enunciating his words clearly and slowly, looking Rocco right in the eye. “And yet, I’m pretty sure that the instructions I issued were quite clear. You were supposed to keep an eye on Danilo. And instead . . . ”

  Silvio Anacleti burst out indignantly.

  “Well in fact, we kept an eye, we kept a close eye, Sebastia’. And until you finally busted Fabio’s balls one time too many, nothing went wrong.”

  Sebastiano stiffened. That was an open challenge, or if it wasn’t, it was damned close.

  “Explain what you mean.”

  “Huh, what’s to explain? He asked you for something and you insulted him to his face. So he just reacted.”

  “And if you ask me,” chimed in Rocco, who now had Silvio’s back, “that dickhead Danilo asked for it.”

  “And you all agree?”

  Sebastiano stared at the Calabrian, the Sicilian, and the Neapolitan. They kept their eyes downcast. They said nothing.

  “So you think we should just let it go. Or even better, let’s decide which of us will go to beg his pardon, ask Fabietto’s forgiveness. You, Rocco? Or how about you, Silvio, since you’ve got such a nice running patter?”

  The Calabrian cleared his throat.

  “So what do you want, a gang war?”

  “What do you want, for us to wake up one morning and here’s some guy strutting around, lording it over us in our own backyard?”