For All the Gold in the World (2 page)

“I returned the retainer. I have no further fiduciary responsibilities toward that client,” I clarified before changing the subject. “Any news about old Rossini?”

“He went to Monfalcone to take delivery of his new speedboat. Can you guess what he's decided to call it?”

“Sylvie,” I replied confidently. The woman he'd loved more than anyone else in his life, the woman who'd never quite been able to recover from the torture she'd suffered during a long kidnapping. She'd killed herself before our eyes. I couldn't help thinking about it every damn day. I understood her decision and I'd been glad that she'd chosen to share it with us, her friends. What I couldn't stand was the fact that we'd rescued her too late, after the worst had already happened. Her captors had paid with their lives, but sometimes that wasn't enough to hold the melancholy of her absence at bay.

Beniamino was a bandit. A smuggler and a thief. That's what he'd always been. We'd met him in prison, and he hadn't been like the others. The criminal world was populated by people devoid of human qualities. His human qualities, in contrast, were extraordinary. As we took turns watching each other's backs, we became friends and decided to face our destinies together, as a team.

Max got ready for his appointment. He wore a light-colored jacket over his navy-blue shirt and his jeans. On his feet were a pair of brown loafers. They'd come back into fashion.

He said that May was striding determinedly toward June, and that it was hot out this morning. Maybe that afternoon the temperature would drop; it often rained later in the day, and thunderstorms cooled the air.

“You're stalling,” I said, teasing him. “You're probably going to be late.”

He left, slamming the door behind him. I read the local papers. The upcoming regional elections were being fought out over issues like immigration, the Roma, and crime. Mayors were having themselves photographed with reassuring rifles in their hands. The Veneto would vote with its gut; that's how it'd choose the winner.

In Padua, a group of young people had organized a giant drink-in in Prato della Valle; they called this Woodstock of alcohol the Botellón. For the past few years, they'd been getting their kicks by drinking like idiots one night a year. They already did it every day in the piazzas of the city, guzzling down dozens of gallons of spritz, but the minute it was an organized event, the city declared it illegal. The mayor had closed the area off with metal fencing, police patrols, and a myriad of ordinances, threatening to report to the postal police anyone who dared to share news of the event on Facebook. A genuine leader of the community.

City hall was perpetually at war with someone. A charitable woman had taken in a number of Nigerians who had fled from areas controlled by Boko Haram jihadists and survived the trip across the Mediterranean to the island of Lampedusa; for this she had been harshly criticized by the city's first citizen. An association of Paduan shopkeepers had protested by organizing a torchlight parade meant to ward off a potential outbreak of human kindness and solidarity. Among those marching, there may well have been merchants who were laundering money for the Mafia, which suddenly seemed less dangerous when its rivers of dirty cash helped to prop up the economy in a time of crisis.

Nothing too surprising. Northeast Italy is a complicated territory, split between mountains and plains. And swamps that aren't marked on the maps. Swamps everywhere. Full of dangerous, lethal snakes. Places where an alligator could wallow, rake the muck, make some trouble.

I went to honor to the ritual of the aperitif in Piazza delle Erbe. I took a seat in the sunlight, showing off a pair of vintage sunglasses with extremely dark lenses. I'd paid perhaps more than I should have for them in a shop that specialized in midcentury modern accessories.

I called my friend, the saxophonist Maurizio Camardi, and asked him what he knew about “Cora.” He knew everyone in the jazz world.

“She studied singing at my school but I haven't seen her for a while.”

“She's performing at Pico's.”

“I think that's about the best she can aspire to,” he commented. “But you didn't call me about her vocal skills.”

“I like her but I don't know how to approach her.”

Maurizio was known as an expert on beautiful women and matters of the heart. “I don't know her well, but I've always had the impression that for her, jazz is some kind of escape or therapy.”

“That's exactly right.”

“Then get interested in her music,” he recommended. “That's the only place where you can meet her on common ground.”

I ordered a glass of white wine, wondering, frankly, just how attractive I might be to a woman like her.

Max the Memory showed up a few minutes later, interrupting my train of thought. He was furious. Along with the spritz, he ordered a panino with garlic salami and pickled vegetables.

“That woman's out of her mind,” was the preamble to his usual rant. “And she isn't even as thin as you'd expect from someone who chisels a hundred fifty euros out of you just for saying that a diet is sacrifice, and that if you want to lose weight you have to give up everything, and that it takes a stiff upper lip. And while she's unloading this mountain of bullshit, she's waving a bag of julienned fennel and carrots under my nose. She comes talking to
me
about sacrifice? And with that arrogant tone of voice? My life is so riddled with holes that if I wanted to fill them all up I'd have to eat a continent.”

Max had turned purple. He practically grabbed the panino out of the waitress's hand and chomped into it voraciously.

The last time he'd had dealings with a weight-loss professional he'd vanished for three days; I'd finally tracked him down in an
agriturismo
in the countryside around Parma where they made a first-rate
gras pist
—pork lard, pounded and flavored—which he was a complete sucker for.

For Max, too, the problem was the past. Shattered dreams, on the run from the law, then jail, his woman murdered by gangsters. Stories you couldn't tell on a psychoanalyst's couch.

The fragility of existence haunted him. He was paying the price, just as yours truly and Rossini were, for living in a world made to measure, in a niche halfway between a world of crime that horrified us and a decadent country that had no intention of changing.

“I'm done with this crap,” he grumbled through a mouthful of food. “It'll go however it goes. I don't have the energy to pretend I'm a civilian.”

We smoked a couple of cigarettes in silence, watching the people crowded around the fruit and vegetable stands.

“Tonight I'm going to pay a call on Siro Ballan,” I said suddenly.

Max stared at me, chewing the news over. Then a beautiful woman walked by; distracted by her ass, he went back to watching the passersby.

S
iro Ballan wasn't much good as a luthier. Actually, he wasn't much good as a human being either. He was as mediocre as his instruments. He was a tall, skinny man, resentful and unpleasant, who lived all alone in a big house in the country that had belonged to his family for generations. He turned the old granary into a workshop, which smelled of essential oils, shellac, and all sorts of wood: Norway spruce, cherrywood, maple, ebony, rosewood, and boxwood. Along the walls, in no particular order, were a number of tables on which were scattered pieces of soundboxes, as well as necks that went with violins, mandolas, and double basses, all covered with a light layer of dust.

Siro Ballan didn't live off the money he earned from musicians. Over time, he'd built a reputation in the field, but that wasn't what he'd been aspiring to when he'd stubbornly sat down to learn a profession for which he clearly had no gift whatsoever.

If he could afford a certain kind of life, it was due to his large house, which he rented out by the hour. If a gang of bank robbers needed a quiet little place to wait for the police to tire of chasing them, then the luthier would offer them his stables, where it was possible to hide automobiles and delivery vans.

Generally speaking, the most asked-after spot in the house was the living room, reserved for encounters between people looking for a meeting place both absolutely confidential and on neutral ground.

I awaited my potential new client while sipping a grappa cut with Elixir di China, comfortably seated in one of the light-brown velvet-upholstered armchairs, the only lighter note in a room dominated by dark wood furniture.

I heard the sound of a car braking on the pea gravel, followed by that of three car doors slamming.

“That's a lot of people,” I thought to myself, my curiosity piqued.

When I found myself face-to-face with the three guys, I realized that this was a gang or, at the very least, a delegation made up of a gang's most important members. The boss was the first one to introduce himself. “Nicola Spezzafumo,” he said, extending his hand.

In the underworld he was known as Nick the Goldsmith because he specialized in heists and burglaries from jewelery stores and jewelers' workshops. I knew that he'd taken several years in prison like a man, a mark of his character that made him worthy of respect in my eyes.

He must have recently turned fifty and he'd put on a jacket and tie to come to this meeting. The other two were younger. Not much over thirty. Giacomo and Denis. Elaborate hairstyles from a small-town barber, tattoos on their necks and the backs of their hands.

A round of hard liquor and cigarettes to give the new arrivals a chance to size me up properly. The case had to be a sensitive one. I considered their indecision rather offensive, but curiosity kept me in my seat. After an exchange of glances, Spezzafumo made up his mind to speak.

“On November 27th, two years ago, three armed, masked men broke into a country villa outside of Piove di Sacco immediately after dinner, murdering the owner of the house and his housekeeper. His wife and daughter survived because they'd just left to attend a dance recital at the parish church.”

I nodded. I remembered the case. It had been on the front pages of the local papers for months because of the savagery of the murders. This kind of thing had happened before. The intruders knew that there was a safe in the place and they needed the combination to get it open. The victims were uncooperative, and that then unleashed a burst of senseless violence.

The housekeeper, a woman in her early forties originally from Pordenone, had taken the brunt just because she was a woman. The bastards had had their fun with and then pitilessly tortured her until the gunshot to the head came as a genuine act of mercy, putting an end to the poor woman's suffering.

Then it had been the man's turn. A businessman, forty-seven, he and his wife had set up a small atelier to produce cashmere garments. He'd refused to talk as long as he could simply because he knew they'd never leave him alive anyway. The autopsy had revealed the presence of deep burns over much of his body and a bullet hole in his skull.

The subsequent investigation, though meticulous, hadn't produced any definitive results, as the detectives like to say at press conferences when they've come up empty-handed. An anonymous letter, probably written by a neighbor, had reported the presence of three men dressed in black, their faces concealed by ski masks, seen leaving the house dragging three wheeled suitcases. After a short distance, they'd vanished down a country lane where they'd most likely concealed their car.

“I don't understand what this has to do with your business,” I said. “Was the owner of the villa a friend of yours?”

“His name was Gastone Oddo and he was one of us,” Nick the Goldsmith replied, watching for my reaction. I didn't bat an eye, and he decided to go on. “He hid our ‘merchandise' and our weapons, laundered our money, and invested our profits for us.”

I glanced at his confederates. Denis's eyes were glistening. The other man lit a cigarette, his head hunched low. The late Gastone had been well liked.

“Rivals?” I asked.

The three of them shook their heads. “We've investigated, looked into all the crews,” Spezzafumo explained, “both Italian and foreign. We've kept a close eye on all the fences from here to Belgrade. Whoever those butchers were, they aren't in our line of work.”

“So what's your theory?”

The boss let his men answer that question. “A one-off gang,” Giacomo replied.

Denis put out his cigarette. “Someone put it together for this one hit and then dissolved it.”

“How much was the take?” I asked.

“About two million between the gold, the precious stones, and the cash,” Spezzafumo replied. “We'd just pulled off a job,” he hastened to explain, seeing my astonished expression.

“Did they take the weapons with them?”

“Three Kalashnikovs, handguns, ammunition. They didn't leave anything behind.”

“Maybe they just didn't want the police to find them,” I commented. “They were careful to cover up any clues that would point to the robbery's true objective.”

I thought the situation over for a couple of minutes while the three men whispered among themselves, shooting me glances the whole time. Their distrust was palpable.

“The robbers knew that Oddo was your treasurer,” I said in a clear, confident voice. “And they knew that that night they'd find the loot from your latest robbery in the safe. Now, I wouldn't dream of offending you, but it seems clear to me that whoever screwed you knew your business all too well.”

“That's what we thought from the minute it happened,” Denis shot back, some heat in his voice, “but it wasn't any of our guys. We went over all of Gastone's contacts with a fine-toothed comb. We didn't miss a thing.”

“What about his wife?” I asked, just to rule that out.