Gang of Lovers (2 page)

We knew perfectly well that there weren't going to be many other gang wars like this one. It belonged to a criminal world that was disappearing, a milieu in which we had operated under various guises for the better part of twenty years. Now that world was falling apart, forced out of existence by organizations and individuals that disgusted us. We wanted nothing to do with them.

The modern world, in that sector, was by then all mafia: multinational, a cross section of every and all kinds of corrupt institutional power. Corrupt and toxic. When enriching yourself illegally means poisoning people and the places they live, devising latter-day slave trades, and working hand in glove with politicians, businessmen, and moguls of high finance, then free men with a conscience decide it's time to leave the party.

The days when membership in the ranks of self-respecting criminals required only that you have nothing to do with drugs or prostitution existed only in the memories of a very few.

At my side, that night, I had one of the last men of that generation: Beniamino Rossini. A smuggler and an armed robber. A man who stood tall his whole life. Nothing to do with the little pieces of shit who infested the environment these days, cruel to those weaker than them and ready to sell out at the first opportunity. Especially to the police.

I hadn't entered that world of my own accord. I wound up in prison more or less by accident, where I'd earned a reputation as something of a peacemaker, and when I got out, lawyers started turning to me to help them solve certain of their clients' problems. Sometimes that's exactly what really happened, but more often matters turned out to be more complex. That old bandit helped me survive. He knew how to be violent, deadly. Characteristics I'd never possessed, all on account of the blues that long, long ago, I used to sing in clubs here and there.

Max the Memory wasn't a man of action either. Now he was smoking a cigarette, staring into the dark. A fat man with pale blue eyes, but with a heart and a brain as vast as the mountains. He'd become my partner after his dreams had betrayed him and he'd wound up as one of those guys who is expected to pay for everyone else.

None of us had ever have expected to be caught up in that war that we'd unintentionally unleashed. All we could do now was fight. Deserting wasn't an option. Nor was surrender. We'd taken body blows and we'd dealt them out, we'd laid low, we'd unleashed attacks. Six long years had gone by, six years of absolute madness. We were exhausted, and all we wanted now was to go back to our own complicated lives.

So when we saw the headlights of a car turning into the piazza, we heaved a sigh of relief. Max and I came out into the open, stepping into the cone of light underneath a streetlamp, while old man Rossini stayed hidden under the portico of the old market, both hands plunged into the pockets of his overcoat, wrapped around the grips of his pistols.

The woman behind the wheel turned off the engine and stepped out of the luxury sedan she'd driven halfway across France. Her name was Bojana Garašanin and she was a dangerous criminal. A made woman, who'd grown up with the cult of nationalist violence that characterized Serbian gangsterism. Short black hair, stout, muscular, rough features. Her mouth was the exception: truly fine, sensual. A touch of totally pointless craftsmanship.

“Where is he?” she asked, pulling the hood of her down coat over her head. Her breath came out in a plume of white vapor.

I gestured at the darkness behind me. “In a car trunk,” I lied.

She nodded her head as her gaze wandered. She was probably trying to figure out where Rossini was hiding.

“Let my uncle go. I'll tell you where you can find Natalija Dini´c.”

One of that woman's many identities. When we first met her she was calling herself Greta Gardner. “Is that the name she's using these days?” Max asked.

“That's another piece of information you'll get when you release him.”

“It's not that simple,” the fat man explained.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Finding your boss, Dini´c, isn't really a priority for us right now. First, we want to shut down all her businesses.”

She clenched both fists in a gesture of irritation. “That was Sylvie's decision, wasn't it?”

I had no reason to deny it. “She thinks that's the best way to handle things.”

Her voice rose an octave. “That means this thing will never end.”

“Sylvie is the aggrieved party,” I reminded her. “It's up to her to decide how and when to put an end to this feud.”

“Natalija too thinks she's been the victim of wrongs that must be washed away with blood. You killed the two men she loved. You even killed the second one at the altar, seconds after he had placed a wedding ring on her finger.”

His name had been Vule Lez, and he was another Serbian gangster. As he died, he bled all over Natalija Dini´c's wedding dress, in the Serbian Orthodox church of St. Sava, in Paris, before pews full of guests. An execution-style murder that had been strategically important in terms of the feud's outcome. Dini´c's first husband, on the other hand, had asked for it. I couldn't even remember his real name anymore, only the name the Serbian intelligence agency had given him when he showed up in Padua. Pierre Allain. This guy wanted to force us to investigate the theft of a colossal quantity of drugs from the vaults of the Institute of Legal Medicine. We'd politely turned down the job, but he had insisted, had made life hard for us, forcing Rossini to shoot him. We'd buried his corpse under the one of the countless new highways being built across the northeastern Italian countryside and had considered the chapter closed until his widow decided to take revenge. In the worst way possible.

“Your boss should have taken it out on us,” I replied, “not on Rossini's woman. She had Sylvie kidnapped, she tortured her, and then she sold her to a gang of Kosovar mafiosi. She suffered too much, and now she can't forget.”

The woman touched her temple with a brusque gesture. “The truth is that she's out of her mind. Both of them have gone crazy. Natalija lives only to look as much like Sylvie as possible. She's had surgery three times now, and she keeps staring at pictures of her, trying to figure out new details to copy. Her plan is to eliminate Rossini's woman, but only once she's become her identical twin. And then she'll take care of the rest of you. And what she has in mind must have been suggested by the Devil himself.”

I shook my head, horrified. “That's not going to happen. We're going to stop her first.”

Bojana smiled. Or rather, she bared her teeth. Tiny, sharp teeth. “Only if I help you,” she pointed out. “And in any case Natalija's businesses cannot be part of any deal. My family has decided to purchase them.”

“That's a white slave trade racket,” I reminded her. “We've already decided to put an end once and for all to the sexual-slavery ring you people have been running for years.”

She spread her arms wide. “You're asking too much. My father and his brothers have decided to offer you my boss's life in exchange for my uncle's. But that's it. I know them: if you insist on these ridiculous conditions they'll sacrifice the hostage, even if he is a beloved member of the family, and they'll establish an alliance with Natalija Dini´c in order to destroy you.”

Max and I exchanged a glance. We were in no condition to fight a war on two fronts and our strategy was crumbling before our eyes. We hadn't taken into account the Garašanin family's greed.

Bojana suddenly stiffened. I turned around and saw Beniamino coming toward us. He'd gotten tired of listening to the conversation through my cell phone.

“Fine. We'll settle for the hide of Natalija Dini´c,” he told the woman, extending his hand.

She shook it vigorously. “That's best for everyone. I tell you where to find her and you let my uncle go. He must be freezing, shut up in a car trunk.”

“The last thing in the world we'd want you to think is that we don't trust you,” I said with a hint of irony. “Still, I think we'll let your uncle go only after all this is over.”

Bojana GaraÅ¡anin shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it was worth a try. And in any case, we'd have certainly kept our word.”

“Like hell you would!” snickered old man Rossini. “Now, where is Natalija?”

“In Lyon,” the Serbian woman replied, pulling a couple of folded sheets of paper out of her pocket. “I've written all the information you'll need right here.”

“You've been her bodyguard for years and years now,” Beniamino pointed out.

“Twelve years, to be exact. At first, it was just me, and then Ana came to work for her too.”

“That's exactly who I wanted to talk about. Should we consider her an enemy or is she up-to-date on our understanding?”

The woman took a step forward and poked him in the chest with an extended forefinger. “When it happens we'll do nothing to interfere, but remember this: nothing happens to Ana, or I'll cut your throat with my own hands.”

Rossini nodded. “I was just making sure. In cases like this, you always risk making mistakes that could make other people very unhappy.”

Bojana relaxed. “Follow the instructions and we won't have any problems,” she added as she headed back to her car.

I stared at Rossini. “You just shook hands with her.”

“That's right.”

“That means we're willing to let the GaraÅ¡anin gang take over our enemy's businesses.”

The old bandit shrugged. “We can't save the world, Marco. All we can do is try to put a dignified end to this matter.”

“What about Sylvie?”

“Once Natalija is dead, maybe she'll start living again. Though I have my doubts, and the shrinks don't seem especially optimistic.”

Max pulled out his cigarettes and we smoked in a silence charged with bitterness.

“If what Bojana says is true, it'll feel like shooting my own woman,” Rossini commented.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked. “Otherwise we can ask Luc and Christine. I'm sure they'd be happy to oblige.”

I was referring to Luc Autran and Christine Duriez. A married couple, armed robbers from Marseille, who had joined our little army out of a longtime friendship with Rossini. Every so often they'd rob a bank or a jewelry store to help finance our expensive survival.

Beniamino was smoking with his eyes half-shut and his neck tucked deep in the lapels of his long camel-hair overcoat. He crushed out the butt with the heel of his shoe. “It's up to me to do justice.”

 

Twenty minutes later we drove through the front gate of a farm that a real estate agent couldn't manage to sell but had been willing to rent to us for far more than the market price, no questions asked. In the large kitchen, embers still glowed in the fireplace, and the temperature was quite cozy. Max assembled a snack from bread, salami, and cheese.

“Lyon is the capital of fine French cuisine,” he said as he fooled around with a corkscrew. “I know a couple of
bouchon
s in rue de Brest that are worth a visit.”

“I don't think we'll be there long enough,” Beniamino retorted. “And more importantly, it's not like the three of us can be seen at a restaurant together.”

The fat man was unfazed. “That just means I'll go alone. And then I'll tell you all about the flavors and smells.”

“Stop spouting bullshit and give us the information that Bojana handed over.”

He pointed to the down jacket hanging from the coatrack. “It's in the right-hand pocket. And stop insulting my perfectly legitimate desire to expand my culinary and enological horizons,” he objected, gesturing with the salami. “If it weren't for me, there wouldn't be even the slightest trace of poetry in your diet.”

“Among your many fine qualities,” Rossini broke in, poker-faced, “the one I value most highly is your incredibly thick skin.”

I ran my eyes over the sheets of paper before interrupting my friends' banter by reading aloud. It was a list of dates and times, all of Natalija Dini´c 's appointments over the next two weeks, laid out in a faintly childish handwriting. Gym, dentist, hairdresser, beautician.

Max picked up his iPad and started looking up the addresses on the map of Lyon. “They're all downtown. Narrow streets, lots of traffic, police everywhere.”

“As long as it's inside, any building will do. The main thing is to pick the right building for what we want to do,” Rossini said as he stood up. He cocked his pistol. “I'm going downstairs to get the ‘uncle.' He still needs to eat and he must be curious about how our meeting went with his little niece.”

A few minutes later, our prisoner was seated at our table, sipping a glass of red wine. His name was Lazar Garašanin, he was close to sixty years old, and he'd distinguished himself in the civil war that had dismembered Yugoslavia by eliminating a respectable number of Croatian civilians. He considered himself a soldier, an officer, and he put on the airs and demeanor of one. But in reality he was nothing but a butcher.

He and two other “veterans” had kidnapped Sylvie and handed her over to Dini´c. For money. Then he'd been hired again to eliminate us in Paris, but he'd made the unforgivable error of underestimating old man Rossini's experience and instincts. He'd watched his accomplices die, and then he'd surrendered. Beniamino had held the muzzle of his pistol jammed against his forehead for several long minutes.

“Unfortunately we need you alive,” he'd finally whispered in disappointment as he lowered the pistol. Lazar had fallen to his knees, sobbing like a baby.

That same evening we'd sent a message to his niece and the negotiations had gotten underway.

“We met with Bojana,” I informed him.

“In that case, I'll be going home soon,” he snickered nervously, stroking the gray stubble on his chin.