The Night of Rome Page 13

  “Sebastia’, let’s be clear about this: Fabio isn’t just some guy. He’s a guy who’s growing, and fast, he’s good at spinning money, and right now, the way things are . . . ”

  “The way things are?”

  “We can use him.”

  “I’ll decide who we can use.”

  “Bullshit,” erupted the Sicilian.

  That was the signal they’d been waiting for. The lid had come off. Excited voices as they all talked over each other, finger-pointing, beads of sweat pearling up on brows furrowed by deep creases, ponderous accents, white-hot accusations.

  “Easy for you to talk, now that you’re playing footsie with politicians!”

  “Since Samurai’s been behind bars, you’ve forgotten what the street is even about!”

  “You want to start a war, but with what army?”

  “You seem like the guy who shoulders his rifle and sets out on a charge, come on, men, follow me, and then he turns around and looks around, and he’s all alone in the middle of the field!”

  “If it keeps up like this, they’re going to be sending UN peacekeepers to Ostia. The bulldozers are back on the beaches.”

  “Samurai’s behind bars, and times have changed.”

  “War isn’t good for anyone!”

  “Samurai always used to say the same thing: war isn’t good for anyone!”

  “Let’s give him the security on the construction sites, let’s give him some of the cash for the jubilee, after all, what does it really matter to those asshole friends of yours, the builders? They still have to kick in the cash. Let’s just sign a pact, and at least that way, we’re all working, and nobody gets hurt.”

  “Yeah, let’s make this damned pact once and for all. And let’s make it the right way, good and proper,” the Calabrian hissed softly, putting an end to the uproar.

  They’d finally fessed up. Samurai was demanding too much. Fabio had guaranteed to bring the percentage down to twelve, and they were all in agreement. In a word, Fabietto had bought them off. And they had been much less loyal, or perhaps less naïve, than poor old Danilo. Who had paid for all their sins. And Rocco and his men were living in a fool’s paradise if they thought for one second that someone like Fabio Desideri was going to settle for the crumbs from their table. Sebastiano put on the mask of the wise gang lord and smiled.

  “You have a point, I hadn’t considered all the different angles on this thing.”

  Glances of satisfaction went round the table. At last, the kid was getting his head on straight. Here he was, Samurai’s unworthy heir, returning to the fold. Sebastiano understood, once again, that there was a gulf that could never be bridged between him and those people. They didn’t belong to the same breed, and they never would. There would be no occasion on which they wouldn’t inevitably make him pay for his roots, so different from theirs.

  He only had one weapon to turn the situation around. Sheer ferocity. So ferocity was what he was going to use to play this game.

  “We’ll make a pact. Fabio will be forgiven. He’ll join in on Danilo’s construction site and the percentages will drop to twelve percent. That’s what you want, right? You’ll hear back from me in the next few days.”

  They hastened to agree. Then they drank a toast, rigorously multiethnic: raki for the gypsies, Vecchio Amaro del Capo for the Calabrian, whisky for the Neapolitan and the Sicilian. This little UN security council for cutthroats, thought Sebastiano. The meeting ended with handshakes and backslaps. Samurai would have approved. Ferocity. The maximum possible ferocity.

  He told his driver to take him to La Quiete, the clinic in Grottaferrata where Danilo Mariani was licking his wounds. He found him in a dressing gown, ass in the air, a wreck, puffy with rage and thirst for vendetta.

  “We’re working on a deal. But we have a problem. The companies that can’t be brought into the deal will have to be excluded. You’re on that list.”

  “Me? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You’ve made mistakes, Danilo, and you know it. And right now, we can’t afford to make any more.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “All I ask is for you get yourself straight again, and to get some rest and take things easy. Think you can do that?”

  “Don’t worry, Sebastia’! But that piece of shit Fabio.”

  “I’ll take care of him. You just try not to pull any more boneheaded moves.”

  VII.

  MONDAY, MARCH 23RD

  Saint’s Day: St. Walter of Pontoise

  OLGIATA GOLF CLUB. MORNING.

  Narcissist that he was, Setola had chosen the western eighteen. Eighteen championship holes. And he hadn’t had time to choose the club from his golf bag before he started up with his gobbledygook. To Sebastiano’s ear, it was little more than a succession of sounds, an indigestible and vainglorious cavalcade of phrases from English golfspeak, made up of memories from epic games that had never been played and poorly digested fragments from the specialty press.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you about that year at the Alps Tour in Zurich when . . . Well, Rodman had a great backswing, and I remember his face when I notched that birdie. I was sure it was going to be a bogey but instead . . . ”

  Sebastiano wasn’t exactly in the mood for this, but he knew that this round of torture was necessary before they could get to the heart of the matter. Setola loved golf like all the nouveau riche latecomers of his ilk in Rome. And already, that alone would be enough to make Sebastiano hate that morning on the greens at Olgiata, the enclave for VIPs along the Via Cassia, just north of the city. One of those places where what counted most was going there to make sure you’re seen. Most of all, though, the source of that hatred, once again, was the memory of his father. He used to play, too. He too had forced Sebastiano to play when he was a boy, and he’d dreamed of his son turning professional one day. Not one of his father’s dreams had come true.

  “So, Sebastiano, like I was telling you, the game goes on, and guess what I come up with?”

  “What do you come up with?”

  “A nice fat chip shot.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “No, for real. The only way to attack that dogleg is to try to end it with a draw.”

  Setola was, of course, a terrible golfer, and the boredom and half-hearted nature of his shots was in keeping with the relentless chitchat that accompanied them. At the fifth hole, Sebastiano decided to call an end to it.

  “Have you talked with Samurai about that matter with Fabio Desideri?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  Setola turned cautious, his voice dropping to little more than a whisper.

  “You know that Samurai is against street wars. He always has been.”

  “Fabio challenged me, my friend. And he did it because Samurai’s in the big hotel and Fabio thinks that I’m a weakling. I have to fight back.”

  Setola sensed in Sebastiano’s words a dangerous quivering of rage. But as was so often the case, his narcissism kept him from halting short of the brink of disaster. He recovered his ball from the bottom of the sixth hole and, as he bent over, without bothering to look up at Sebastiano, he continued.

  “He says you need to sit down at a table with Fabio and come to an agreement.”

  “Fabio isn’t looking for any kind of agreement. Fabio just wants to eat everything up, have it all for himself. That’s not hard to see.”

  “Well, Samurai says that . . . ”

  “That’s enough! I’ve had it with this fucking Samurai!”

  The fury with which Sebastiano had uttered those words froze Setola to the spot. And he immediately went all mellifluous.

  “Forgive me, Sebastiano, I only meant to say . . . ”

  “What exactly did you mean to say, huh? Samurai says, and Samurai thinks, and if Samurai we
re in your shoes he’d . . . . I’m sick and fucking tired of it. I’m not Samurai. I’m Sebastiano. And, until shown otherwise, I believe that I’m the one who’s out here in the streets. His money, his respect, his name all depend on me. And on me alone. I didn’t lose my father to have him replaced with another father who I didn’t choose and who, for that matter, didn’t even have the courage to bring me into the world in the first place.”

  “Or to leave you an orphan, either.”

  Setola cursed himself at the exact instant that his last syllable reached Sebastiano with all the violence of a stabbing knife thrust. But it was too late to summon those words back. Sebastiano stared at him with an unnatural glare. He grabbed the golf club he’d been holding with both hands. He raised it over his shoulder, charging it with all the strength and fury he had in his body. With a shout, he unleashed the golf club, swinging it straight at Setola’s skull, bringing the murderous implement to a halt scant inches from the lawyer’s left eye.

  The lawyer took a step back, pushing both arms straight out in front of him, as if trying to put some extra distance between him and Sebastian. Who shot him an evil grin. And pulled the club back over his shoulder again. This time with both arms straight, the club swinging in a rocking pendulum behind his head. This swing lurched straight out at the lawyer’s left wrist. And just like the first time, it came to a halt just an inch from the target. Which was now the Rolex, Setola’s pride and joy.

  “At the very least, I ought to shatter your wrist. If I spare you, it’s strictly out of respect for Mr. Rolex.”

  Setola thought he could glimpse in Sebastiano’s words a glimmer of peace that he ought to try to capitalize on. Immediately.

  “Sebastiano, please forgive me. I didn’t . . . didn’t . . . ”

  “Stop whining.”

  “Listen, Sebastiano, Samurai says that Fabio has an army, and you don’t. What do you have right now that you can call your own, aside from the power of money?”

  “But money is everything. I’m surprised that Samurai could forget such a basic law of power. Money will give me the army I need.”

  “He told me one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Swear you won’t get mad. These are his words.”

  “I’m not going to get mad.”

  “He said that if you’re going to fight a war, you have to take your gloves off.”

  Sebastiano sank into a silence that Setola wisely avoided interrupting. That morning, he’d already been reprieved once. He accompanied what remained of that golf game with only essential waves of his head and club. Now to point the way to the next hole. Now to comment on the score.

  Sebastiano was thinking. Samurai doubted his military abilities. There could be no other explanation. Prison couldn’t have conditioned him to the point of falling for promises of peace from someone like Fabio Desideri. Samurai doubted he was up to the job and reserved the right to postpone the war to a more favorable moment. When he was back out on the street. But this is my war, too, Samurai. This is my war most of all.

  At the last hole, Setola started fooling around, trying first one position and then another, and then the first again. He gripped the iron and loosened his grip, visibly a prisoner of a sudden anxiety that betrayed, once again, his remarkable mediocrity at that game. A sort of bewitched tarantella that so unnerved Sebastiano that he finally just grabbed the club out of Setola’s hand. He twisted in a magnificent swing. The ball sailed high in a perfect curve, as if designed by a protractor. Ace.

  Sebastiano handed the club back to Setola and smiled.

  “You see? You just won.”

  Setola smiled hesitantly. He cleared his throat with an angry but brief fit of coughing.

  “So, what should I tell Samurai?”

  “That he should reread his copy of Nietzsche’s Collected Writings on Wagner.”

  Setola stared at him, flummoxed.

  PIAZZA TESTACCIO. AFTERNOON.

  For an afternoon of sheer glory, you need a lot of things. Or just a few, depending on your point of view. The fact remains that in that piazza, for Martin Giardino, all those things were finally there. Aligned, like the stars. Yes, this was his day. For that matter, how many times had they whistled at him in derision, there in Testaccio, as he raced away on his bicycle during his furtive inspections of the never-ending construction site for the renovation of the old market piazza? How many times had he been chased by those howls of scorn that some guy, short and getting along in years, regularly unleashed on him every time he saw him go by, cupping his hands to make sure the sound was amplified and no one in the quarter—seriously, no one at all—could claim not to have heard it?

  “Geeeerman. Hey Geeeerman. Geeeerman, make us laugh!”

  And now, on a magnificent sunny afternoon, yes, the people of Testaccio were laughing. Laughing hard. The piazza was being given back to the quarter. Restored to spaces that were lost in the memories of the old people. What’s more, the Fountain of the Amphoras was triumphantly back in the place it belonged, after a decades-long exile on Piazza dell’Emporio, facing the Kremlin, where it had wilted for more than half a century, transformed into a traffic median. The fountain was a symbol of the origins of Testaccio. The Monte dei Cocci, literally mountain of shards, built with the rubble of broken crockery that imperial Rome unloaded from ships at the nearby River Port.

  From the stage for the speeches erected on the short side of the piazza, facing which a crowd had gathered, Giardino was observing the party, greatly pleased. Like in a gigantic mirror. He looked down at the people of Testaccio, the testaccini, and thought to himself. About how suddenly the wheel of his popularity had turned in just one short week. The announcement of the extraordinary jubilee and now his reconciliation with one of the “reddest” quarters in the city. He’d never felt so powerful before. He was bobbing in a state of grace that, for once, didn’t reduce him to the caricature that his enemies and, even more, his friends in his own party had made of him. So this was the moment to enjoy that force and power. But it was also the moment to dare, to run a risk. He’d made up his mind. He was going to give the city his announcement that he’d chosen Adriano Polimeni as his extraordinary delegate for the jubilee.

  At the foot of the stage, Temistocle Malgradi observed Giardino as he preened in his joy like a peacock. Old political slut that he was, Malgradi was hardly surprised. All the same, knowing something about life and therefore about human vanity, he was still convinced that the Polimeni matter could be resolved. He’d explained it to Sebastiano in clear and definitive terms, and he expected him to report it back to that babe he was screwing, Chiara Visone.

  “I’ll take care of this Polimeni.”

  All he needed to do was let Giardino puff up like a toad and then he himself would transform Polimeni into one of those statues up on the Janiculum Hill that were only good for pigeons to shit on. Polimeni wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last extraordinary delegate in the history of the Eternal City. And just like the first one and all those that had followed in the first one’s footsteps, he wouldn’t count at all—nothing is what he’d matter. He knew how to tame the German. So he climbed the few steps up to the stage and, as a giant screen played images of the restoration of the Fountain of the Amphoras for the piazza full of people, he took the mayor aside.

  “What a show, Martin!”

  “Yeah.”

  “You deserve it.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “In fact, I think I deserve it too.”

  “Now you ought to cash in on it.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean to do.”

  “With the city at your feet, you can do just as you please with the jubilee.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The important thing is not to lose control.”

  “Or never have it
in the first place.”

  What the fuck kind of line was that? Malgradi glowered.

  “I don’t understand, Martin, excuse me. What do you mean by saying that the important thing is never to have control in the first place?”

  “A good politician doesn’t sit down to draw up public works contracts. A good politician traces the general outlines. And then separates his responsibilities from the bigger picture of execution.”

  “Excuse me, I don’t know if I agree entirely.”

  “There’s no need for you to agree or disagree.”

  What the fuck had this asshole gotten into his head? Look out now, I wouldn’t want the German to get the idea that he was actually the mayor.

  “I really have to insist on this point, Martin. I believe that, even though Polimeni is no doubt an excellent choice, you ought to . . . ”

  Giardino interrupted him. The documentary about the restoration of the fountain was over. He walked over to the microphone to address the piazza.

  “My dear friends of Testaccio, just a few words before I leave you to enjoy what is yours by right . . . ”

  Just a few words. Sure. Giardino started talking and it felt like he was never going to stop.

  A buzz of voices arose and from the opposite side of the piazza, an old woman confined to an electric wheelchair began to manifest signs of particular intolerance. She had a copy of Il Corriere dello Sport in her lap and she was chain-smoking like a chimney, one cigarette after another. Behind her, a woman who could easily have been taken for her sister was every bit as itchy. She kept her forearms resting on the handles of the wheelchair, as if resting up from some deep ancestral weariness.

  Neither of them was just any ordinary woman. Word had it that this was the mother and the sister of Libano. The bandit who, until he wound up facedown in a pool of blood in front of the bar where the tough guys of the period gathered, had been the last king of Rome. No one knew whether those two lumpen matrons really were his last surviving kin, but one thing was clear about how things worked in Rome: between a mediocre reality and a venerable legend, it’s always the legend that prevails.