For All the Gold in the World (15 page)

Rossini was sitting in the armchair, Max and I on either side of the desk. An image straight out of a TV jury: the latest round of assholes examining the competitors, who try to persuade them that they have the necessary expertise and skills.

“Have a seat,” Beniamino began, pointing her to a chair a couple of yards away.

All-Knowing Mirko squeezed her arm. “Listen to these gentlemen, Serenella, they have an interesting proposal to make you,” he said, before leaving as he'd been told.

She obeyed with docility, but the expression on her face suggested something else entirely. She didn't understand what was happening and our presence was making her uncomfortable. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Journalists, cops, insurance examiners, circus performers,” I replied. “Whatever you're thinking is fine because it doesn't matter. What does matter, though, is the fact that we're willing to give you cash in exchange for certain information about Lorenzo Patanè.”

Serenella was a pragmatic woman. “What kind of information?”

“We want to know who he saw when you were taking care of him.”

“And how much are you offering?”

Rossini pulled a wad of bills out of the breast pocket of his jacket. “Five hundred.”

“Two thousand,” the woman countered.

We pretended to discuss this amongst ourselves. “All right,” said Beniamino.

“And five free sessions with All-Knowing Mirko.”

Max took advantage of the opportunity to have some fun. “If the information is first-rate, we'll give you ten.”

The nurse nodded in satisfaction, pocketed the cash, and started telling what she knew.

“At first the house was always full of people, then it slowly emptied out. Lorenzo never accepted what had happened to him and as time went on he became increasingly unpleasant. I was forced to leave because he tormented me with questions of a highly personal nature, he wanted me to tell him about my private life, and when I refused to do so, he would get cruel. He was unbearably insulting. I later heard that they hired a male nurse but that he's not happy either.”

She wasn't telling us what we wanted to know, and I politely pointed that out to her. She went straight to the point.

“While I worked in that house, I occasionally saw Kevin Fecchio, the businessman who killed himself recently, and Vick Bellomo, Lorenzo's best friend. He came to visit quite often when he was in Italy. But I saw them only when I had to work late, otherwise I wasn't there by the time they arrived. But I knew they'd been there because of the stink of cigarettes and the dirty glasses.”

“Did Bellomo leave the country frequently?”

“Yes, he'd stay away for months at a time, but now he's stopped. About two years ago he opened a pub nearby, in partnership with another guy who worked with him.”

“And what line of business was he in?”

“From what I was able to gather from the conversations between the Patanès, he was a policeman of some kind and worked as a bodyguard for some very important men.”

“Same as his partner in the pub?” I asked.

“So I heard.”

We exchanged satisfied glances. Those two guys had all the marks of men with a past as military contractors, mercenaries who worked security in war zones. Five thousand euros a month and a license to kill. Very little was said about the Italians who went to work in these companies whose profits boggled the mind. Very little indeed. Italians are, after all, good people.

Signora Serenella left satisfied. She hadn't had to say anything compromising and she'd earned a nice wad of cash, to say nothing of the comforting power of the All-Knowing Mirko's magic, though Mirko came close to fainting when he discovered that he'd have to defraud the woman free of charge.

“That's not fair,” he objected. “Ten sessions are too many.”

“Get used to it.”

“You don't understand. Serenella has romantic problems, she's divorced and she wants to get back together with her husband, who's started seeing another woman in the meantime, a much younger woman, obviously.”

“So?”

“These are matters you can settle in two, three sessions at the most because there
is
no solution. If I drag it on for so much longer, it means that I really have no powers, and Serenella will go around telling everyone just that.”

Beniamino put a hand on his shoulder. “You have our heartfelt sympathy.”

The psychic was surprised at the old gangster's jovial tone, which was due solely to the fact that for the first time we could risk a bit of optimism.

Max turned on his tablet and did a few Internet searches. “Bad Boys Pub,” he read out, “owned by Ludovico Bellomo and Salvatore Adinolfi.”

A few seconds later, we were admiring their pictures on the bar's Facebook page. They were big and strong, gym-hardened, their heads shaved and their sideburns dense and sculpted. If it hadn't been for the difference between their complexions and a few of their facial features, they could easily have been taken for brothers. Ludovico, “Vick,” was young, he must have been twenty-seven, perhaps twenty-eight, the same age as Lorenzo Patanè. Adinolfi was somewhere between thirty-five and thirty-eight.

“Maybe we've reached the last of the Russian nesting dolls,” I said.

“We'll collect a little information and tomorrow night we'll go have a beer at these gentlemen's place of business,” Rossini proposed.

 

We never did set foot in the Bad Boys Pub. In twenty years of work as an investigator I'd never found myself forced to consider atmospheric events among the variables of a criminal case. And it hadn't been since 1930 that such a destructive tornado had touched down on Italian soil. Just a few hours after our meeting with the nurse, the Dolo district was devastated by the fury of a cyclone packing winds of more than 185 miles per hour. Nothing was left of one venerable old villa but photographs to testify to its one-time existence and beauty. The roofs were torn off hundreds of homes; pieces of furniture flew into the air as if they were sheets of paper.

Volunteers, journalists, and politicians looking to gather votes converged in great numbers. The situation was far more serious than it had at first seemed.

A small item in a local paper told us that the Patanè home had also been seriously damaged. Apparently the Bad Boys Pub had fared even worse. The proprietors had spread the word that the place would be closed for the next month.

Old Rossini decided to go see for himself and discovered that the roof and part of the kitchen had been damaged. A couple of weeks, no more, the contractor in charge of the repair work had guaranteed. A likable, talkative young man, who envied Vick and Salvatore because they'd taken advantage of the situation to go on vacation.

“They're on the move,” Beniamino announced when I answered the phone. “They've decided to beat us to the punch.”

S
cattered across the belowdecks table on the
Sylvie
were disassembled weapons that Rossini was cleaning and oiling with meticulous care. “They took advantage of the tornado to disappear,” I said, trying to piece together what had happened, “but I can't believe that they've already figured out who we are and are ready to kill us.”

“You forget that Fecchio wasn't the first one who had dealings with us. They've had all the time they needed to investigate,” Max objected.

“What do they know for sure?” Rossini asked.

“That we represent the housekeeper's son,” I replied. “We told that to both Kevin and the Patanès.”

“And then everything they wrung out of Gastone Oddo,” added Max the Memory.

“Their most likely targets then could be the little boy, the widow, and the Spezzafumo gang,” Beniamino summed up, pushing a gun brush through the barrel of a .45-caliber pistol.

“Sergio is twelve years old, doesn't know a thing, and I doubt they're planning to hit him to get at us. It would be a senseless move,” I retorted. “Now that we've identified Lorenzo Patanè, they feel vulnerable, and it's logical to assume they're planning a bloodbath to protect themselves.”

“I agree,” said Beniamino. “We need to alert that harpy, Gigliola.”

“I'll take care of it,” I said.

“And I'll take care of gathering information about the two ex-contractors,” Max added. “I know a journalist who's been monitoring local recruitment for quite some time.”

“Okay. I'll go look in on the boy, just in case we've got it wrong,” Rossini concluded.

While I was driving toward Piove di Sacco in my beloved Å koda Felicia, listening to Papadon Washington sing
The Blues Is My Story
, the volume on full blast, I received a phone call from Cora's husband.

“She has another one, now I'm sure of it,” he complained.

I was sure of it myself and, relieved to hear that he still hadn't figured out it was yours truly, I feigned a detached and professional stance. “And how did you find out?”

He said nothing, uncertain whether or not to answer the question. “The laundry hamper,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“I opened the hamper to drop in a shirt and a whiff of the smell of ‘man sex' filled my nostrils.”

This wasn't the first time I'd run into spouses who'd discovered an affair thanks to a particularly well-developed and suspicious sense of smell.

“That's all?” I replied at random. “It doesn't strike me as reliable evidence.”

“Listen, I don't want to come off like an obsessive husband who gets to the point where he's sniffing his wife's panties, but I don't want to be taken for a fucking idiot either. I need to know what's going on here.”

“I understand. So what are you planning to do?”

“It must be someone who hangs out at that club where she sings.”

“And so?”

“I want to go there in person. I need the name, and the last time we talked you forgot to give it to me.”

It hadn't been an oversight. “If I were you, I wouldn't show up while she's singing. She'd never forgive you.”

“What the fuck do you know about it? You weren't even able to figure out that she was sleeping with another man.”

“You don't know that.”

“Let me be the judge of that. What's the name of that damn place?”

I heaved a sigh. “Pico's Club.”

“I'm glad you gave me back that retainer,” he said in a combative tone. “That way I don't have to ask you to give me my money back.”

He hung up before I could retort. I was tempted to call the jazz woman and warn her, but I couldn't do it for the simple reason that she was convinced that I didn't know her husband.

A fucked-up situation. All I could do was wait and hope that in the inevitable clash between husband and wife, my name didn't come up.

 

The gray roots at the center of her scalp were so unmistakable that for an instant I was tempted to point them out to her. But I decided against it the instant I remembered who I was dealing with. That detail too was part of the character that Gigliola Pescarotto was playing: the woman overwhelmed by a cruel and relentless fate, now surviving on her own strength alone.

“I'm surprised by this visit,” she said in a bored voice. “I thought that, with Kevin Fecchio's suicide, the whole case had been closed once and for all.”

“You forget that we have a client.”

“Cut it out with that bullshit, tell me what you want and get the fuck out of my hair.”

I liked her better as a gang boss. “Don't be rude, I just came here as a gesture of courtesy, I could have spared myself the effort.”

“And maybe that would have been better.”

I lost it. And I really let her have it. “The only reason I'm here is for your daughter, to keep her from coming to a bad end.”

She changed her tune. “What's going on?”

“We've identified the rest of the gang that killed your husband and poor Luigina. They thought they were safe after killing Kevin but we've managed to track them down.”

“Who are they? Give me the names of those animals.”

That day everyone seemed to be demanding information from yours truly. I shook my forefinger sharply. “No,” I told her, and I couldn't help but mock her. “Not even for all the gold in the world.”

“I have the right to know.”

“You forget that I have no obligation toward you whatsoever,” I retorted. “What I can tell you is that right now they're at large, armed and dangerous. They definitely have something in mind, maybe they're planning to come pay you a visit, or rub out the Spezzafumo gang.”

She grabbed her sewing shears. “Tell me who they are. Otherwise, how the fuck am I supposed to defend myself?”

“Don't threaten me,” I hissed. “See if Nicola and his henchmen can protect you, though I'm pretty sure the other guys are stronger. One good piece of advice is to take your vacation early this year.”

She lost her temper, lunged to her feet, and tried to run me through with those shears. Luckily she was skinny as a nail and after a brief struggle I managed to disarm her and knock her to the floor with one shove.

“Pack your bags and run,” I repeated to her as I left the office.

Her shouts followed me out. “But where? For how long? You're just going to get us killed, you bastard.”

I stopped at a nearby bar. I was shaken. That hand armed with sharp steel trying to find a way to tear open my chest had scared me. I ordered an espresso and a grappa.

A few minutes later, Nick the Goldsmith called. “We need to meet.”

“We don't have anything to talk about.”

“You're putting us in a dangerous situation that will only create problems. Problems between us, too.”

I was tired of being threatened by despicable creatures. “You didn't even deserve the warning you got. We behaved properly and there are certain things you have no right to bring up.”