For All the Gold in the World (19 page)

“That's not our problem, Marco,” he snapped out. “There are four of us involved in this deal, and rethinking the whole thing at this point is out of the question. I already know what the others would say. They'd invite you to wait and talk to them a week after the robbery.”

“And if we turned down that invitation?”

“Then you'd force us to take sides with Spezzafumo,” he replied. “But please don't paint us into that corner over a stupid matter of principle.”

I took the last few puffs and crushed out the butt. “You're too strong for us,” I pointed out. “You could easily field twenty armed men, and the only one on our side who pulls the trigger is Rossini.”

The old fence's face lit up. “I see you're finally starting to listen to reason. All of us put together would be capable of wiping you off the map without breaking a sweat. But we're reasonable people and we're happy to give you carte blanche, after this deal is done.”

I raised a hand to interrupt. He hadn't understood a thing. “If something unpleasant were to happen to yours truly or to Max the Memory, no one would think twice,” I explained, “but if Rossini were to catch a bullet, his friends from across the border would come to avenge his death. Several French friends and a couple of Dalmatians, for sure. I just recently met the Dalmatians, they're professional killing machines. None of you would be left alive.”

He laughed in my face. “You're bluffing.”

“No. But you are, because you're the last guys who want to get caught up in a gang war. It would be bad for business. In this country, not even the various Mafias leave the streets littered with corpses anymore. Do you really want to be the ones to revive that old tradition—four broken-winded old fences? I'll say it again: Call off the deal.”

He sighed. “It's too late, and let me repeat: This is the biggest job in the last ten years.”

Spezzafumo's gang was about to swing into action. A matter of days, if not hours. Two days at the most. “Too bad for you,” I said by way of farewell as I pulled open the door.

I went back to Padua and informed my friends.

“I've waited too long, if anything,” said Rossini.

He procured a stolen motorcycle and, armed with a pair of revolvers, he went to the home of Nick the Goldsmith, in the countryside south of Padua, on the boundary with the province of Rovigo. He spoke to the young Polish woman who lived with Nick, and met the fair-haired child she held in her arms. The woman told Beniamino that Nicola would be away for another couple of days.

Beniamino asked her if that was Nicola's son and, with a broad smile, she told him he was. “He's my man and soon he's going to be my husband.”

Our friend returned home with deep misgivings. “Who'll take care of them, after I've killed Spezzafumo?”

I saw my opening and I took it. “We can always reconsider how necessary this is.”

“Do you want to have to watch your back for the rest of your life?” asked Max.

“He's not wrong,” Rossini put in. “But right now all we can do is wait for events to unfold. Those three are hidden somewhere, waiting to carry out the robbery. In the end, that asshole Tazio Bonetti was right: We're going to have to settle our differences afterward.”

“Siro Ballan,” I blurted out suddenly. “I bet they're holed up at the luthier's place.”

We looked at each other for a few seconds, savoring the idea of putting an end to the stalemate, but old Rossini reminded us: “That place is untouchable.”

We moved to Punta Sabbioni, intending to stay there until we could come up with a better idea about what to do next.

We talked until we were blue in the face, trying to figure out a solution that would allow us to sidestep our own rules. On the one hand, old Rossini wouldn't budge about applying them; on the other, he hoped as much as anybody that he wouldn't be forced to go in guns blazing.

“I can't get the sight of Spezzafumo's kid out of my head,” he kept saying in a worried voice.

 

It was an entirely workaday anonymous phone call to the armed robbery enforcement squad at Vicenza police headquarters that solved the case. When the Spezzafumo gang burst into the goldsmith's workshop, they found themselves surrounded by policemen ready to open fire. Nicola, Denis, and Giacomo put up their hands and wound up behind bars, facing the prospect of at least five or six years in—possibly even longer given the fact that they were armed with military-grade weapons.

According to a well-informed journalist, to whom I slipped three hundred euros, the tip had come in from a phone booth somewhere around Piove di Sacco. Which meant it had been the widow who betrayed her partners. The fences hadn't dirtied their hands and they'd killed the deal, negotiating with the only real boss. They must have told her that they were pulling out to avoid starting a war with old Rossini, and that the gang needed to be dissolved to prevent any future “misunderstandings.” Those four bloodsuckers couldn't allow Gigliola to start working with other fences or they risked losing control of the market.

“Nothing personal, strictly business,” Tazio most certainly had told her, stealing the line from some movie.

And the widow had been forced to make a hard choice: sell out her friends and give up on the idea of getting rich. She wasn't powerful enough to take on the fences, and she'd given in to their will.

No doubt they'd indemnified her in one way or another, probably by offering her a marginal role in the garment sector of their business. The thirty pieces of silver always get handed over, one way or another.

Our outlaw hearts couldn't conceive of betrayal. That was totally alien to our worldview. But in the criminal underworld, everyone betrayed everyone else. It was the perfect solution, always ready to hand.

I waited for nightfall and drove over to Gigliola Pescarotto's house. I got out of the car and positioned myself in the middle of the street, my gaze fixed on the front of the house. I guessed that the sound of the car stopping in front of her villa would alarm her immediately, and I expected her to look out the window.

I saw a curtain move and a second later the woman's head appeared.

She gestured for me to phone her.

She looked at me for a couple of seconds and then withdrew slowly until she was swallowed up by darkness.

 

A few days later, news hit of a family tragedy. A father had shot and killed his paraplegic son and his wife and then turned his weapon on himself. And so, in the end, Ferdinando Patanè had worked up the nerve to take that pistol out of the drawer. According to the journalists, the motives for that deranged act could be traced back to the 2009 armed robbery, when young Lorenzo had been shot in the back by two still unidentified robbers, and to the ensuing tribulations endured by a family that had been abandoned by the state and found itself with no way out.

But the story was soon filed away. Just then, it served no one's interest. The most popular story was the “victory” of a town in the Treviso area that had succeeded in evicting a hundred or so immigrants who were being housed in a residential hotel. With equal parts ferocity and fear, the revolt against the “Africanization” of the region continued.

I went back to Pico's Club the last night before it closed for August. Cora wasn't there, that night the trio was playing, but, right up to the end, I held onto the hope that the jazz woman would saunter onstage for one last song.

I stayed there until daylight talking with the piano player about music and women, between swigs of alcohol and handfuls of peanuts, to keep from succumbing entirely to a weepy drunken bender.

“You know, I don't even know your name,” I confessed when the time came to say goodbye. “I've known you by sight for years but we've never shaken hands.”

“Duke Masini,” he introduced himself. “My father loved jazz and dreamed that one day I'd become a musician. Probably a better one than I actually am, but you can't have everything.”

I shut the place down and boarded my Felicia, heading for Pordenone. Blues from the stereo and warm air that came pouring in through the open windows.

The boy was waiting for me at the ground floor entrance to the apartment building, gripping the handle of a wheeled suitcase they'd bought from Chinese street vendors. His hair was neatly combed, the part straight—clearly the work of patient application with a wet comb. He wore a jacket that was too small for him and a pair of English-style shorts. He looked like a proper young man from times gone by who had stepped straight out of a yellowing photograph.

His uncle stood beside him, his arm wrapped around the boy's shoulder.

“Are you ready?” I asked him.

He bowed his head and mumbled words I couldn't understand. No, he was by no means ready for the journey he was about to undertake, but I was sure he'd soon change his mind. Or at least, that's what I hoped. My experience with human beings of that age was nonexistent, and with adults it had almost invariably proved useless.

He hugged his uncle, crying like a baby. It was a scene straight out of a nineteenth-century play where the villain of the week yanked the child away from his nearest and dearest to shut him up in a convent run by evil nuns.

“Take good care of him,” the uncle stammered as he shook my hand.

 

He'd said the same words to me a few days earlier when we'd met at a lawyer's office. I'd insisted he bring his wife with him, a woman terrified by their precarious economic conditions and who eked out a living by gutting chickens at a local poultry farm. Even before the lawyer started laying out the reasons he'd asked them to come in, she'd tried every which way to excuse herself for being incapable of pretending to be Sergio's mother.

“I didn't bring him into the world,” she said, getting worked up. “He's Luigina's baby. And she was such a strange girl: What if her son turns out like she did? And after all, it's not that I'm trying to be mean, but we really don't have the money, and we have two children of our own to raise.”

I looked over at the lawyer in the hope that he'd stem that flood of words. His name was Eros Cocco, a good man in his early sixties, of Sardinian origins, who defended Roma and immigrants and therefore never earned a fucking cent. I'd turned to him because he was principled in his defense of civil rights and also because the money he'd make by safeguarding the interests of Luigina and her son would help prop up his financial situation a bit.

Cocco had suddenly reached out and grabbed both Signora Cantarutti's hands. “We understand your point of view perfectly, but now it's my turn to talk.”

The lawyer had explained that he'd invited the husband and wife there today to inform them that there was news about Luigina and Sergio. Arnaldo, as her brother, would receive 100,000 euros' worth of indemnification.

The man was on the verge of fainting. “Where on earth does all that money come from?”

Cocco explained that this was a private donation, the result of a negotiation that had been handled by other lawyers.

Then he added that a trust fund had been set up to ensure that Sergio would be provided for and could afford tuition until he graduated from university. “But the condition is that your nephew be sent to live in a different family environment than yours. We haven't yet identified the family, but I will make arrangements at the earliest possible opportunity.”

They'd accepted the terms with an exaggerated sense of gratitude, and this summer trip was part of the understanding.

They weren't bad people, but they certainly weren't up to the task of raising a boy like Sergio, a boy who would grow up marked by the fact that his father hadn't wanted him and that his mother had been a somewhat strange woman whom everyone had taken advantage of.

The money that the Patanès had managed to scrape together wouldn't be enough and Beniamino had sold Sylvie's jewelry and the house in Beirut to help those who were in need and had a right to it.

One afternoon he set out with a bag full of cash and went back to knock on Nicola Spezzafumo's front door. The Polish girl who had made the error of falling in love with an armed robber was on the verge of despair and old Rossini had given her a nice lump sum so she could take her little boy and go back to live with her parents and start a new life.

This too was a way to settle matters.

 

“Do you like the blues?” I asked Sergio when we got into the car.

“I don't know.”

I slipped in one of Catfish's prescription CDs. The Altered Five Blues Band struck up
I'm in Deep
.

He listened for a few minutes, then started looking out the car window. I told him he was free to play the radio and he fooled around with the controls for a little while until he found a station that broadcast only Italian music. He knew lots of singers I'd never heard of. He explained that they came from reality shows. I had no difficulty taking him at his word. All Italy had turned into a reality show. I found out that he liked to talk and that, like all little kids, he loved stuffing himself with junk food. At a service area I gave him ten euros while I went to take a pee. When I got back, he'd already spent it all on potato chips and candy in unsettling colors.

He didn't ask any questions and I offered no explanations concerning the destination of that odd field trip. I was traveling in the company of a twelve-year-old boy and I was out of my comfort zone. He seemed so fragile; I was afraid I'd put my foot in it and hurt him somehow.

At last we reached Punta Sabbioni. Beniamino and Max were waiting for us on the deck of the
Sylvie
. Rossini was dressed like Peter O'Toole in
Lord Jim
.

Sergio was overcome with excitement and I had to help him climb aboard.

“On this pirate ship there are two rules that must be respected,” Rossini started out in a voice that was deadly serious. “The first is that I'm the captain and everyone owes me unswerving obedience. The second is that when I make this gesture which means ‘stitch your lips,'” he said, running his thumb and forefinger over his lips as if zipping them up, “everyone is required to keep whatever they've seen or heard to themselves. Agreed?”