The Night of Rome Read online

  “You’re the owner,” said Wagner, stiffening.

  “That’s not exactly right. This boat is owned by a company. I’m just renting it from that company. As a matter of fact, only for certain times of the year. If you like, I ought to have in my possession not only the boat’s registration papers, but also the lease I have with that company. Therefore, if you will, let me insist on making that coffee for you, and then you can head back to the barracks to check more carefully the terms in which these documents are framed.”

  Wagner, who until that moment had kept both hands at his sides, instinctively moved his right hand behind his back. A movement that didn’t escape Fabietto’s notice. His visitors were certainly not financial police.

  “You see, Lieutenant, I don’t wish to seem arrogant, but I don’t see what else we have to say to each other. Nor, frankly, what legitimate right you have to remain on this boat.”

  Kessel aimed his Beretta at Fabietto.

  “Asshole, put your shoes on and come with us to the barracks.”

  Convenient.

  “All right,” Fabietto smiled. “Albeit with a less than perfect Italian, you, sir, have made your point. I’ll put on my shoes, as you suggest, and I’ll come along willingly.”

  Wagner nodded.

  “Now we’re talking,” he said. Even if it was clear by now even to him that the masquerade had fallen through. An intuition that ought to have led him to do what, instead, he failed to do. And he certainly paid the price for ignoring it.

  All alone, Fabietto trotted down the steps that led to the cabin, and quickly found a cubbyhole where he’d stashed his Comet, a marine flare gun that took shotgun shell flares. He quickly loaded a shell, and popped two more into his pocket. Then he put on his shoes and, his arm held straight before him with the locked and loaded flare gun, slowly began to retrace his steps, toward the stern cockpit.

  “I’m coming up . . . ” he said.

  “Take your time, take your time. We’re in no rush,” Kessel laughed rudely.

  And that was the last time in what remained of his life that his mouth had anything like a natural expression.

  The shell fired from Fabietto’s flare gun hit him square in the center of his jaw, taking with it a part of his face.

  The scream and the stench of scorched flesh filled the space just seconds after Wagner fired a series of shots down into the staircase, and then ran up onto the gangway that connected the boat to the wharf. Ring, gun in hand, bent over his brother, who was huddled over in a pool of blood. His weapon was trembling in his hand. Tears were blurring his vision.

  “You bastard! You bastard!” he shouted. Then, in his turn, he started shooting at Fabietto. An instant before the second shell hit him in the right shoulder, knocking the pistol into the water. He felt a lancing pain and, instinctively, reached up with his left hand, trying to claw out of his flesh that incandescent projectile. Now the palm of his hand was sizzling as the burn sank deep into that flesh as well, and on the wharf Wagner’s shouting voice reminded him that there only remained one thing to do.

  “Run, fuck it! Run! Ruuuuuuuuun!”

  Fabietto slowly reemerged into the stern cockpit, holding a towel to stop the bleeding from the bullet hole in his forearm. The bullet had gone through, shattering the bone on its way. He saw Bogdan come running, then he glimpsed the silhouettes of the officers from the harbor police as they boarded and bent over Kessel’s lifeless body. He had enough strength left in him to articulate a few words.

  “There were three of them. They were trying to kidnap me.”

  Then he lost consciousness.

  XXI.

  APRIL 19TH

  Saint’s Day: St. Gerold of Cologne, Martyr

  PRISON IN NORTHERN ITALY.

  Samurai emerged from the full lotus position and grabbed his copy of Crime and Punishment from the shelf on the wall over his cot. He was allowed to possess books, provided they had received prior authorization: Can you imagine any lawmaker of the European Community immune to humanitarian scruples? And culture, after all, it’s a well-known fact that culture is always a good thing.

  Samurai had drawn up a list. An older junior officer, something of a lifer, with brilliantined hair, had forwarded it on, somewhat disconcerted. Nietzsche, Mommsen’s History of Rome, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Shakespeare’s tragedies.

  “Samura’, what are you trying to do, get a college degree?”

  “You know what they say: it’s never too late.”

  A month later, they had delivered the first volumes. All of them scrupulously examined and all stamped, page by page. Only one request had been rejected, because it was deemed inappropriate: a collection of Carabinieri jokes.

  Yet another confirmation of how there is no remedy to human stupidity: it had been precisely in order to gain that rejection that Samurai had included a request for that slim volume. Not so he could read it: but so he could offer the censor an opportunity to exercise his petty power and feel the corresponding rush of pleasure.

  He didn’t know where he was going, and hadn’t even given it a thought. He knew one thing only: “All this has to end today, in one go, right now.” He wouldn’t go home otherwise, because he didn’t want to live like this.

  He needed to meditate. Setola, in his last visit, had reported good news and terrible news. Rome had returned to normal, but Fabietto Desideri had survived a . . . what had Setola called it? An attempted meeting of the minds. What a vivid imagination, the old pettifogger had. The law on wiretapping had been definitively watered down by the scruples of the last survivors of Italy’s period of extreme legal crackdown. Chiara Visone, in other words, had failed. For the upcoming hearing before the Supreme Court, then, there was no hope but to rely on the lawyer. But there was something even more unsettling than the prospect of ongoing time behind bars. Something that had to do with Sebastiano. The young man, according to Setola, had become elusive, as if corroded by some internal conflict. At first, Samurai had attributed the fury with which he’d defied his orders to mere youthful enthusiasm.

  But, upon more careful reflection, it might be something else. Something far more dangerous. Hence the link with Dostoyevsky.

  The slow descent into the inferno of Raskolnikov, a murderer who seeks redemption without repentance, only to come at last to the conviction that there can be no redemption without repentance. That parable had the power to leave him deeply uneasy. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He’d gotten away with things many times before, and he’d never felt even the slightest twinge of remorse. The possibility of an alternative path disturbed him. It troubled him that someone like Dostoyevsky should have written it. It meant that this alternative really did exist. That there were people willing to throw their lives away in order to follow a path that was so . . . so senseless.

  Repentance! Redemption! And in the end that son of a bitch, the investigating attorney Porfiry Petrovich rubs his hands together and sends the young man off to Siberia. That was definitely the wrong finale. People like Raskolnikov should be murdered in their cribs. He adored Dostoyevsky. A great romantic who had known czarist prisons, and who had passed from a revolutionary youth to the far right. Taking into account the differing contexts, a life story not all that dissimilar from his own.

  But what about Sebastiano?

  If he had unleashed a war as a desperate, final assault . . . in order to court defeat? To bring down the ultimate and final ruin? The Ragnarök of the Nordic sagas. In the end, he’d emerge dead. Or else free. Free and cleansed.

  He still had too little evidence to base a conclusion on, and that was why it was absolutely necessary to regain his liberty.

  Fabio Desideri was still on the loose, and at this point there were no margins. The job needed to be done. If prison hadn’t entirely demolished his intelligence, well, then he was capable of reading his protégé’s mind.
/>   Sebastiano would finish up his game with Fabietto, and then he’d leave him. For good.

  Forever alone.

  The problem was certainly a serious one.

  XXII.

  APRIL 20TH

  Saint’s Day: Pope St. Anicetus

  SWITZERLAND. CANTON TICINO. IL CARDO NURSING HOME.

  His nurse, a magnificent blonde with big hands and long, tapered fingers, gently finished massaging his neck with an ointment of mineral essences and whispered into his ear that the morning therapy was over now. Facedown on a massage bed lined with organic cotton sheets, Danilo Mariani nodded slightly, feeling for the first time in a long while the sensation that he possessed a body. And therefore, a skin, a smell, blood in his veins. It must be the effect of the sedatives he’d been stuffed with for the past three days, he decided. Or maybe the first of the cycles of self-donated blood transfusions, which were done by that machine they’d hooked him up to the very same night he’d arrived. A silent centrifuge in which his own blood was replenished with oxygen, so that it then could reactivate collapsed synapses, deleted desires, senses inhibited by years of heavy narcotics dependency.

  The first twenty-four hours had been horrible. The hallucinations had followed one after another in a terrifying psychotic sequence that had featured the faces of Sebastiano, Samurai, and Malgradi. In the middle of the night, he’d been awakened by his own screams, convinced that he was, first, suffocating under an avalanche of cocaine, and then buried alive under the mechanical mole of the construction site of the metro C line at Piazza San Giovanni. At dawn, in the bathroom of his suite—a barren rectangle decorated with pastel hues and with a large French door looking out upon a forest of fir trees stretching out into the distance—he’d wept bitter tears, convinced he could no longer locate his cock between his legs, no matter how hard he looked for it.

  But now, in fact, he really did seem to be awakening. For the first time, that morning, he’d even been able to eat. Some marmalade and organic honey spread on boatloads of whole-wheat biscuits. And even the herbal teas that he’d been prescribed were starting to taste good to him, all three liters that he was brought on a daily basis.

  The nurse gently caressed the back of his neck and then wrapped him in a feather-soft dressing gown of some white yielding material. She explained to him that, for the first time that day, he’d be allowed to leave the spacious grounds of the clinic and venture down toward the lake for a stroll.

  “Alone? Can I go alone?” asked Mariani.

  His fräulein shook her head, indicating he could not.

  “I guessed not.”

  “No,” she replied, in that mountaineer’s accent that the Swiss Italians of the Canton Ticino had. “Not alone. But maybe with your friend that I met down at the reception desk a short while ago. He asked me to tell you that he’s waiting to see you.”

  “What friend?”

  “He said that he comes from your city, from Rome.”

  Danilo was shot through with rush of adrenaline. Who was this man who’d come to see him? And above all, how the hell did he know he was here? Only Sebastiano could know that.

  “Is he a handsome young man?”

  The young woman smiled uneasily.

  “I couldn’t say, handsome, perhaps. Though, actually, not really handsome. And maybe not young, either.”

  He instinctively decided to refuse to see whoever it was.

  “I don’t feel much like going out. Maybe it’s not a good idea. Ask your colleague to find out who it is. And say that I appreciate the visit, but that I’m just not up to it. I’m still feeling very weak.”

  The nurse picked up the telephone and dialed the extension for the front desk. She spoke a few words in German. Then she turned to speak with Danilo.

  “Your friend insists. He says to tell you that Sebastiano sent him.”

  Danilo felt his throat go tight.

  “What’s his name? Ask the name of this friend of mine, please.”

  That Italian really was a character, thought the nurse. But at Il Cardo clinic, they were not only paid to ask no questions about their guests, their history, and their pasts. They were paid especially to make sure their guests’ every whim was satisfied. And so she turned back to the phone and further questioned her colleague at the reception desk, speaking in German.

  “On the passport he gave to my colleague, the name is Temistocle Malgradi.”

  Mariani felt a sudden surge of relief.

  “Oh, all right. Tell her that I’ll take ten minutes to get ready, and then I’ll be downstairs.”

  “So you feel better now?” smiled the nurse.

  “Definitely,” Mariani agreed.

  Malgradi gave him a vigorous hug.

  “How are you, good friend?” asked Temistocle, slapping him on the shoulder and looking him up and down, from the top of his head to his shoes.

  Danilo made an uncertain face.

  “Better, I’d say. Let’s just call it a long road ahead.”

  “I know. I know. Deep down, even though I’ve forgotten it myself, I’m a doctor and I understand the problem.”

  Malgradi locked arms with him. Danilo greeted a small knot of doctors at the front door of the clinic with a brief nod, assuring them that he’d soon be back, and then the two men ventured into the park, heading for the trail that cut through the woods and led down to the lake.

  For a while they walked in silence. Danilo took deep breaths of the warm early afternoon air, the intense scents of the underbrush, a bouquet of moss and wood, while his gaze wandered toward the peaks, still snow-capped, that surrounded the valley.

  “And to think that I’ve always sort of hated the mountains,” Mariani said at a certain point.

  “You can say that again,” Malgradi piled on. “Plus, in the mountains, zero pussy.”

  “As far as that goes, I’ve had to change my mind about that, and fast,” he replied, thinking for a moment about the deep cleavage of his fräulein in a white smock.

  They went on walking without exchanging any other words. Until Malgradi pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his jacket pocket and offered Mariani one.

  “They warned me not even to take a single puff.”

  “What are you, in middle school? I’m a doctor and I can tell you if something’s good for you or bad. With all this fresh air, how do you think a little carbon monoxide is going to hurt you. It’ll just bring back the taste of home. Go ahead.”

  Danilo took two greedy puffs and felt a sense of bewilderment, followed by a slight vertigo.

  “Better, right?” smiled Malgradi.

  They’d emerged from the woods and now their feet were sinking into the water-soaked grass along the edge of the lake, which stretched out before them: a cobalt-blue mirror in which the mountains were reflected. Danilo stopped and, without turning to look at Malgradi, came straight to the point.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To say hello and see how you’re doing.”

  Mariani turned to face him, abruptly.

  “Temistocle, I’m a cocaine addict, but I’m not a complete idiot. Why are you here? Did Sebastiano send you to check up on me?”

  “I’m not Sebastiano’s sheepdog.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “You need to know the truth, Danilo. Because that’s the only way you can go back to being the man you once were and still deserve to be. To conquer an addiction, you need to be strong, confident. And in order to be strong, you need to love yourself. And in order to love yourself, you have to be willing to know, you can’t be afraid of it.”

  Danilo was stunned. He’d known that animal Malgradi for years, and it had never occurred to him that he might be able to speak in a language any different from that low-life criminal vulgarity and obscenity that only politicos who haunt the Capitoline Hill know how to wield. E
ither Malgradi was reciting a role that he’d memorized, or else he was face-to-face with some strange revelation. In any case it was worth his while to ask Malgradi to show his cards.

  “What truth are you talking about, Temistocle?”

  “It would be best for you to know who’s behind this hell you’ve plunged down into. Why you’re in this prison. Why you can never set foot back in Rome.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Adriano Polimeni, the extraordinary delegate for the public works of the jubilee. That Communist appointed by Giardino. Let’s just say that Polimeni had and still has an excellent understanding with Chiara Visone, that tremendous slut who’s been fucking Sebastiano. It was Polimeni who convinced her that, without you in the way, the jubilee would have a nice clean face. And the slut, who now controls the party, asked and obtained your head on a pike from Sebastiano.”

  Danilo stared at the surface of the lake; a light breeze had started to ruffle the flat mirror of water. He took a deep breath.

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I could just tell you that you have to believe me because you have no alternative. Because by telling you what I’ve just told you I’m risking my hide without getting anything in return for that risk. But instead I’ll tell you that you have to believe me because you’re an intelligent man and, if you put together all the pieces of what’s happened to you in this past month, you’ll conclude that what you’ve just listened to could only be the truth, pure and simple.”

  Danilo took a short walk along the lakeshore, leaving Malgradi behind him. A hundred feet or so away, a fisherman was quickly landing a fat brown trout, bringing it in with deft, fluid, whirling movements of the rod. The fish was thrashing violently, flailing against the surface of the water, twisting in the agony of the hook that had penetrated its gills, struggling in vain to regain its respiration and its freedom. Until, at last, following one last decisive yank, the man pulled the fish onto shore. The fisherman’s left hand immobilized the fish, pressing it against the ground. The right hand grabbed a rounded club, hoisting it into midair. The blow hit the big fish between the eyes, launching a jet of vermilion blood, the distinctive hue of fish blood, charged as it is with oxygen. Just like Danilo’s blood was now.