For All the Gold in the World (12 page)

Kevin Fecchio was radioactive, and they'd decided he was too risky to keep around.

His partners had rid themselves of him in clever, elegant fashion after learning that three thugs had laid an ambush for him in the home of a prostitute and that he had blabbed indiscriminately because he'd been positive he'd been dealing with the Spezzafumo gang.

It had become necessary to murder him to burn all bridges linking them back to their crimes, to keep anyone from being able to trace their real identities.

From the very beginning we'd been betting that the notorious recording of Oddo's confession, whether or not it actually existed, wouldn't surface.

Fecchio's murderers had no interest in bringing the cops into the matter. The case would have drawn so much attention that the minister of the interior himself would have been bound to provide men and resources to bring them to justice.

A case that seemed destined to explode, taking with it everyone connected to it, had been defused with a simple murder. Everything had been hushed up and both Kevin's accomplices and the widow Oddo could count on getting off scot-free.

But we couldn't toe the party line. Our client hadn't obtained satisfaction of any kind and as far as we were concerned the investigation continued.

 

Beniamino went back to Punta Sabbioni and to his jaunts aboard the
Sylvie
. He had no interest in suffering the brutal heat that had been forecast for some time, and which was now slowly roasting the Po Valley. Padua was like a flaming match and the old bandit abandoned us to our fate, a prolonged and complex phase of the investigation: scouring old news records for any case that might have something in common with the crime that had first changed Kevin Fecchio's life and figuring out whether any of the victims had ever subsequently crossed paths with him.

We were convinced that to forge an understanding strong enough to form a gang, they couldn't live very far apart. They must have spent time together and become intimate, a path punctuated by a long series of encounters steeped in hatred, resentment, and bitterness. Their grief over the things they'd suffered had sent them straight to hell, and they'd made up their minds to stay there.

So we started to focus on the most savage crimes perpetrated in the province of Vicenza.

Max looked up from the folder of newspaper clippings he was perusing. “The first time I seriously considered seeking revenge was when they killed my Marielita.”

I felt, as I always did, a stabbing pain in my chest. For me too that was a particularly painful memory. She'd died in my arms, hit by a burst of bullets fired by the local mafia that had dominated Veneto back then—at least until the clan's capo, Tristano Castelli, sold his gang out to the state like some bankrupt corporation.

“And the death of her murderers actually made me feel better,” he added after a brief pause.

“Revenge always provides a healthy dose of satisfaction and comfort, even though its limitations are unmistakable since it's incapable of restoring to you that which has been taken,” I commented with considerable conviction. “And in any case, it must be an act of justice. The exact opposite of the barbarity of Fecchio and company.”

“I still don't really understand why they acted like butchers in a splatter flick. If they'd limited themselves to murdering Spezzafumo and taking back the gold, no one would have really objected.”

I slapped my chest. “Because they don't have outlaw hearts,” I shot back. “If civilians decide to go beyond the bounds of their laws, they lose all sense of proportion. Even when all they're doing is embezzling public funds. They turn into sharks, they become predators.”

“It's not that simple, Marco.”

“I think it is. Those three let themselves go and commit truly vile acts because they were convinced they had the right to do so. They went into that villa certain they'd be absolved of their sins because they were sure their victims were guilty, and as such deserving of nothing but contempt.”

“And once we got involved, Kevin was sacrificed because he was endangering the impunity of the two others.”

“A preemptive murder,” I pointed out. “These people weren't born yesterday.”

“And I'm pretty sure they'll have other surprises in store for us,” the fat man added, going back to his reading.

Between the Internet and Max's archives we managed to reconstruct a bloody map of armed robberies carried out against villas, goldsmiths' workshops, and jewelry shops. Organized crime had given up the tradition of robbing banks in grand style and had focused in on private citizens, who were less able to defend themselves.

Terror and brutal violence. The Oddo home invasion numbered among the cruelest in a long list of tragedies. And for the cops it was never easy to track down the culprits. The Northeast of Italy was a borderland and the gangs attacked and then retreated with the greatest of ease.

The contempt for human life displayed by this new brand of globalized crime sent shivers down the collective spine. For that matter, it was perfectly in line with the attitudes that now dominated the world. And there wasn't the slightest indication that things were going to improve.

 

On the third day we identified a possible candidate. It was Sunday and in Greece the people were about to vote in a referendum that would decide their economic future. The rest of Europe applauded this pretense of democracy at gunpoint.

The man we were looking for might very well prove to be a certain Ferdinando Patanè, age fifty-four. He'd come up from southern Italy at the end of the seventies and opened a jewelry shop in the center of Dolo, one of the most prominent towns along the Riviera del Brenta.

In the winter of 2009 two distinguished gentlemen with “Slavic” accents entered and pulled out their guns. Patanè's son, Lorenzo, age twenty-one, a promising engineering student at the university of Padua, was in the rear of the shop. The robbers shot him in the back while he was facing the wall because, according to their unappealable judgment, the father had been too slow to provide certain answers.

The young man survived, miraculously, but was left paralyzed from the neck down. His mother Geraldina had told the story of the family's tragedy with great courage and dignity. She tracked down local journalists and pushed them to keep the public informed about her boy, who no longer had a future.

Patanè, the father, on the other hand, had been reluctant to talk. It seems that he was torn by a sense of guilt at not having been able to reach the handgun he kept in a drawer. He'd shut down his business without fanfare and devoted himself to his son. Rumors circulated in town: that the jewelry shop was insured for a ridiculously small sum and that the merchandise that had been stolen was worth a large fortune. Mistakes you pay for.

Maicol and Kevin Fecchio were among the very few who had come to express their solidarity, a moment immortalized by a photographer at the front entrance of the hospital where Lorenzo had been taken. Patanè was a loyal client of theirs, as the two brothers had explained to the reporters, and “the tribulations they were experiencing constituted an endless injustice that could be blamed on a state that had long ago given up its responsibility to protect merchants and businessmen, allowing criminal gangs from eastern Europe to ride roughshod over the territory.”

The statement had clearly been tweaked by the author of the article but the concept was clear.

The jeweler had repaid the courtesy by attending Maicol Fecchio's funeral. The two men must have cultivated a pretty solid friendship because Patanè had locked arms with Kevin.

After the service, Patanè, recognized by the journalists, had given a series of very short statements all of the same tenor: death penalty, right to self-defense, absent and impotent government.

We'd found pictures and reports of their friendship up until a couple of months prior to the robbery in the Oddo villa. Then nothing. The ex-jeweler hadn't showed up at Kevin Fecchio's funeral, and he'd probably produced some credible excuse, since nobody had commented on his absence.

Instinct and experience told us that we'd tracked down one of Kevin's accomplices. But there was a very persuasive argument that he'd had nothing to do with the torture and the murders. Kevin was a strong man, in tip-top shape, perfectly capable of slipping a ski mask over his head and carrying out a violent crime, while Ferdinando Patanè was short, skinny, and frail-looking. He certainly wasn't a man of action and we could safely rule out the idea that he'd set foot in the villa. Up until then, our theory had been that the group was made up of three men. But if Patanè was a part of the conspiracy, as we suspected he was, then it meant that there was a fourth man. At least.

 

An unlicensed investigator like yours truly could hardly turn to the police for information. Unlike my officially registered counterparts, I had to steer clear of the cops, who could only bring trouble.

In twenty years of work as an investigator I'd managed to sidestep the issue by constructing an extensive network of informants in the densest underbrush of Venetian society. All of them people who were frequently living archives, or else capable of laying their hands on solid information on short notice.

Prominent among them was the category of con men. The Veneto boasted a long and venerable tradition in the art of pulling a fast one. Once Max had shown me a long list of local companies that produced a disparate array of goods, in particular in the electromedical field, all of them regularly denounced by consumer unions. The miraculous devices they made were actually worthless frauds, but dazzling TV commercials convinced hundreds of naïve consumers to sign disastrous contracts, put together by certain unprincipled Paduan law firms.

Mirko Zanca, my informant in the Dolo area, was a well-respected professional con man. We'd met him when he was passing himself off as a follower of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer and his Germanic New Medicine. He'd opened three offices in as many provinces and he treated patients who'd lost faith in traditional medicine with natural pharmaceuticals of his own invention, foisting off on them that old fairy tale about the correlation between unhappiness and pathologies.

He wasn't particularly expensive; he charged between eighty and a hundred euros because he felt this was his mission. The truth, however, was altogether different: Zanca felt no pity and he was indifferent to the suffering and death of the people he was pretending to care for.

That was a distinctive characteristic of the category: cold indifference to one's fellow man. Con men ruin anyone they can get their claws into. Including their relatives. I'd known quite a few and over time I'd become convinced that this was a crime that should be subject to serious investigation by the psychiatric community, not just sanction by the criminal code.

We had been hired by the wife of a cancer patient; she was exasperated by her spouse's decision to stop his radiation therapy because “Doctor” Mirko's treatments were undoubtedly more effective.

We'd talked to the oncologist who was treating him, and he'd confirmed that it was absolutely necessary for the patient to return to his treatment at the hospital.

The next day we showed up at Zanca's place without calling ahead, and old Rossini, after leveling a gun at his head, explained that he'd have been perfectly happy to pull the trigger, but that his friends here had asked him to refrain. He personally didn't see the reason. As far as he was concerned, people who deceived and defrauded the sick needed to be shot.

“Don't kill me,” the fake physician had shrieked in terror. “I swear I'll disappear. You'll never hear another word about me.”

And he'd kept his promise. He'd saved his life but he hadn't eluded the long arm of the law. The sudden closure of all of his clinics had aroused the suspicion of several patients who'd reported him to the police. He'd been convicted of aggravated fraud and passing himself off as a licensed physician and sent to prison.

After he got out he recycled himself as the All-Knowing Mirko, an expert practitioner of white, red, and black magic, capable of solving problems of love, sex, and work.

The All-Knowing Mirko received every day by appointment, in a small apartment not far from the center of Dolo. He turned pale when he recognized us, but the absence of Beniamino reassured him to the point of becoming particularly talkative in his attempt to justify himself.

“I'm not doing anything wrong,” Zanca started out. “I tell people what they want to hear, that's all. And I swear on my life that I never accept the sick as clients. If they have so much as a hangnail, I send them home without asking for a cent. As you know very well, sick people cost me a fright that nearly gave me a heart attack—what with that friend of yours—to say nothing of the three years in prison.”

“Satisfy a curiosity for me,” the fat man interrupted him. “Say an out-of-work man comes in here, so desperate that he decides to turn to a seer to find work; how much time and money does he have to squander before finding out that you're just a piece of shit?”

“Actually I am a psychic,” he pointed out, by no means offended. “And really, the ones who come to see me are for the most part the mothers, the girlfriends, and the wives. Let's say that a complete evaluation of the case can run to about three hundred euros. But I don't go any further than that because all I do is remove the evil eye that bars the way to good fortune. That good fortune may then choose to show itself or remain concealed. None of that depends on my magic.”

Max looked at me. “Are you hearing this?”

I shrugged. “Our man Mirko will never change. In any case, we didn't come here to talk about his powers as some fucking wizard. We're here to get some information. If he chooses not to provide us with what we need, then we'll have to call our friend, the nasty one.”