For All the Gold in the World (8 page)

The piano player arrived. He was thirsty, so I bought him a round. He told me that Cora was getting ready and wouldn't be on for at least an hour.

I discreetly slipped him a fifty-euro note. “Would you go tell her that I'm waiting for her here and that I'd like to buy her a drink?”

“Why don't you go?” he shot back, pretending to be offended. “I'm nobody's errand boy.”

“I know that very well. In fact, this money is just to get you to play a couple of songs outside of your usual repertoire.”

He grabbed the bill. “Sorry, I misunderstood.”

“No, I'm the one who should apologize to you. I failed to make myself clear,” I said to put an end to that stupid little routine.

The piano player came back a few minutes later. “She'd like a Singapore Sling,” he explained with a wink, “in her dressing room. With you.”

I thanked him and put my order in at the bar. The piano player watched me, perplexed. “What is it?” I asked.

“I tried so many times with her that, in the end, I decided she was totally indifferent to sex. I'm curious to see if you can get her into bed.”

“I assure you that, at the moment, all I want to do is talk.”

He shook his head. “I know jazz singers, I've fallen victim to them all my life, and I'm willing to lay odds.”

Cora was all ready to go on stage; her makeup just needed a little touch-up. She drank her cocktail in silence. Every now and then she looked over at me. She seemed uncertain and I did everything I could think of to put her at her ease.

“Camardi said that you were an all right guy and that you know how to listen,” she said all of a sudden.

“He's a friend,” I replied, thinking to myself that it was with her of all people that I was behaving badly.

“I like you, but I don't feel like throwing myself into an affair with one of those dull men you always meet when you're going through kind of a strange time in your life, know what I mean?”

“I think so,” I replied cautiously.

“Then you need to listen to me because I have some things to tell you first.”

“All right.”

She lit a cigarette. “Do you know why a woman like me sings jazz twice a week in this dive?”

“I honestly can't even begin to guess,” I answered sincerely.

“I'm a nurse and I work in the serious burns ward and I need some distance from that,” she explained. “I love the work but I'm not made of steel, and you can never really get used to other people's suffering.”

“I understand.”

“I've never cheated on my husband, and now I'm ready to do it. I don't know if it's right or wrong but I want it to happen. Our marriage isn't on the rocks and I love him as much as I ever did but I'm irresistibly attracted to you because you pursued me. You made me feel important. Is all that clear to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then go to the bar and get me another cocktail. I'm suddenly thirsty.”

“You don't want to know anything about me?”

“No. I was told that you're basically reliable but I'm afraid that it would be a mistake to dig any deeper.”

She wasn't wrong about that, and I hurried over to the bar. The bartender was slow. To make the drink, he had to look up ingredients and portions in a manual that had definitely seen better days.

He caught the perplexed look on my face and tried his best to justify himself. “Everyone always asks for the same few things. Then along comes a customer who orders a Singapore Sling, the kind of refined specialties you'd learn at bartender's school, and I've always had to work, I've never had time for any of that bullshit.”

“It's already the second one you've made tonight, maybe you'll start to get the hang of it.”

He smiled, putting a mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth on display. It occurred to me that he was a rare bird; it used to be easier to run into smokers who didn't care what their mouths looked like.

That thought made me miss the bartender's retort, but I didn't bother to ask him to repeat it. I had better things to do.

“Do you know how to kiss?” Cora asked me after a long sip. “Like, really kiss, I mean.”

“I'm a first-rate kisser. Anywhere you care to point me.”

“You seem to think quite a lot of yourself, kid.”

We didn't waste time cautiously exploring each other's bodies. Our tongues intertwined passionately, urgently. I licked her nipples very slowly, almost as if I meant to drive her to distraction, before grabbing her and lifting her onto the makeup table. My hand made its way under her skirt; it was exactly what I'd been yearning to do since the first time I saw her. She pushed my shoulders down and I found myself on my knees, my face buried between her thighs.

I took it nice and easy as if time was all ours and no one else's. Making love on that rickety makeup table was no simple task, but when the piano player knocked on the door to tell us that the concert was beginning, we were embracing, exhausted and happy.

“My dress is all rumpled,” Cora laughed.

“No one's going to notice.”

“Now get out of here, I have to try to fix my makeup.”

Instead, I stayed for a while and watched her. I couldn't break away from her. Jazz woman. A complete mess, frightened, fragile, but she got up every morning and tackled a tough job, in a place where pain was always king, and its dominion went unchallenged.

“I like you,” I said as I left her dressing room.

She looked at me in the mirror and smiled.

 

Cinzia Donato got back in touch just as the weather turned. She called midafternoon as the overstressed windshield wipers of my Å koda Felicia struggled nobly against a violent downpour.

She arranged to meet me at a house in Castelgomberto, just outside of Vicenza, at 7:45
P.M.
on the dot. The madam had always been a stickler for punctuality.

I sighed. It had been a little more than twenty-four hours and I was already standing up my new girlfriend.

She was at work and I couldn't call her. I wrote her a text in which the word “sorry” appeared three separate times.

I turned around and, since I was definitely running early, I left the highway and drove to a multiplex. I had no idea which movie to watch so, basing my decision more or less on the showtimes, I chose a movie by an Italian director. A famous, multiple award-winning director. I'd always been deeply grateful to the auteur school of filmmaking, which had put me in touch with aspects of life I knew nothing about. I often left the theater shaken, sometimes filled with wonder. The movies fed me with stories of the civilian world, as we referred to it, and helped me to understand ordinary people. But I felt no envy. Their world was still one I didn't like. Unlike Max the Memory, I'd never cherished the dream of changing it. I preferred to live on its outskirts.

That afternoon I was sucked into a story of old age and death, told with great delicacy. I sat there as the end titles scrolled past and was the last to leave. I leaned on my car and smoked a couple of cigarettes, immersed in memories of my early life, the life that ended the day I wound up in prison. For the umpteenth time I came to the conclusion that families are complicated and that everything becomes clear only when it's too late. And then all you're left with is time to waste on your regrets.

“You can't change the past,” I muttered under my breath, pulling open the car door and rushing to slip the third CD prescribed by Catfish into the player:
El Diablo
, after the song of the same name by the Low Society Band. Mandy Lemons had a voice that could send shivers down your spine. I'd dreamed of seeing her live for years.

The other nineteen tracks on the disk were all just as diabolical and bracing as the first, from Creole United's zydeco to River of Gennargentu's central Sardinian blues. The memories slipped from my mind.
El Diablo
had managed to persuade the past to grant me a truce.

The street that Cinzia Donato had directed me to was located right behind the town's main piazza; the number matched a small, two-story house squeezed between a bakery and a stationery shop.

I was met at the door by a woman who looked to be about thirty-five, cute, in jeans and a white T-shirt, without a speck of makeup. She said her name was Marika but she hastened to explain that she'd been born and raised in Veneto.

She led me to a living room whose furnishings were all new, with the exception of a ceiling lamp in Venetian-style crystal—the kind of thing that had been fashionable in the sixties. It clashed with the rest. It looked as if someone had forgotten to take it down.

Cinzia Donato was sitting comfortably on the sofa. She greeted me with a half smile. “Darling,” she said to the mistress of the house, “tell my friend all about Fecchio.”

Marika didn't have to be asked twice. “Kevin comes to see me three or four times a month, always late at night. While we're doing it he calls me Sabina, same as his wife, then he bursts into tears, calls her names because she took his children away from him, and holds me in his arms until he falls asleep.”

A man in despair. The world was full of them. I shot a glance at the madam. “So?”

“If you have issues, you need to go to a specialist,” Cinzia snapped, “not to a whore who is, quite obviously, not a therapist. She's a sex worker, a professional who gets paid by the hour, and what she offers is for entertainment purposes only. The fact is, you men are always trying to find a mother.”

It crossed my mind that, in fact, you can't sleep with your arms wrapped around your shrink, but I decided this was no time to venture into idle chitchat. “When's the next time he's coming?”

“He made an appointment for Thursday night at ten o'clock,” Marika replied.

“I'd prefer it if he found me waiting for him instead of you,” I told her. “That way I can talk to him in peace and quiet.”

“Not unless you fork over a thousand euros, which includes the income she'll be foregoing and the temporary rental of the house, along with a guarantee that nothing unpleasant will happen,” Donato stated in a decisive tone. “We're not interested in winding up in the papers. Bad publicity is no good for business.”

“So she works for you now?” I asked.

“The minute we started talking we hit it off,” Cinzia replied. “And after all, can't you see how pretty she is? She's perfect for my clientele.”

Marika was radiant. In the end, we were all happy; we'd all gotten what we wanted.

The madam told me goodbye and reminded me that now I owed her a big favor. That was true. We'd finally get a face-to-face with Kevin Fecchio.

 

The next morning I found a cop waiting for me when I left my usual café-tobacconist. I appreciated his not insisting on being welcomed into my home; it showed great tact. I recognized him first and foremost by his unmistakable Hawaiian shirt. He was the only cop I knew who made a point of being impossible to miss. His name was Giulio Campagna, inspector in the armed robbery division at Padua police headquarters. His ways, just like his apparel, were overstated, and this had definitively thwarted his career. Actually, his manner was a kind of suit of armor meant to conceal his soul, which was perennially tormented. By life; by his profession. He was a good person who wanted to abide by his own rules without cheating. I was sure that he respected me, if in his own fashion, even though he'd made it clear in the past that he'd prefer to see me behind bars. The fact was that I'd forced him to rethink his own concept of the truth, and he'd never forgiven me for it.

“Buratti, you're just the person I've been looking for,” he began, in a strong Venetian accent. “I've got a doubt that's been nagging at me since this morning.”

I started to unwrap a pack of cigarettes, resigned to sitting through one of his goofy tirades.

“I woke up this morning thinking about how the ads for cryotherapy to eliminate hemorrhoids have completely vanished. Years ago the newspapers were packed with ads for clinics that promised to perform miracles by sliding a little piece of Siberia up your ass. I've pored over the local papers and I haven't found a single line about it. What happened? Does no one suffer from this exceptionally irritating pathology these days? Or did they simply figure out that the method was worth fuck all, and now the Italian peninsula is teeming with poor bastards whose rear ends are as red as a baboon's?”

The time had come to interrupt him. “And so you decided it would interesting to come and talk the issue over with yours truly.”

He smiled and accepted one of my smokes. “If not with you, then who? You're the only person I know who's soon going to be in need of a miracle cure to keep from going to prison, which is where, after all, you deserve to be.”

I pretended not to be alarmed. “I have to confess you've lost me there.”

“Just go on confessing, Buratti, because you need to explain to me just why you feel the need to go around with a bunch of other ex-cons asking questions about a certain armed robbery.”

I tried to guess. With Campagna, it was no good trying to deny something he already knew; someone had spilled the beans. Most likely it was the kidnapping scout from Treviso. “Toni Brugnera?”

He shook his head. “My informants are none of your business.”

An indirect confirmation. For that matter, Toni wasn't built to face the harsh realities of prison, a place he'd carefully avoided up till this moment. In the end he'd be willing to rat out his own son-in-law. A gangster like Franko Didulica was a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I sucked down a couple mouthfuls of smoke while I tried to come up with a fairy tale credible enough to get this inspector off my back, but nothing came to mind.

“I know you're working on something underhanded,” he said, touching the tip of his forefinger to the cell phone I had in my breast pocket. “Your landlines and cell phones are as silent as little fishes, which gave me a mischievous idea: cloned or encrypted phone numbers.”