Pronto (11 page)

"How could anyone know I'm here?"

"We'll talk about it, okay?"

She said, "Just tell me where Harry is."

"We'll talk about everything. In an hour."

Friday, November 27, right before they landed in Milan, Nicky couldn't believe it: Tommy the Zip goes in the lavatory with his carry-on bag and comes out wearing a clean white shirt and a different tie. He has the stewardess get his suit coat out of the closet and help him on with it. There were different things like that he'd tell Gloria and a couple of the guys when they got back. How Tommy hardly ever spoke unless it was to tell him to do something. How they walked through Customs, never opened a bag, into the terminal, Tommy the Zip stops, puts his hands out but with his elbows, you know, tucked in against his sides the way he does? And these two Italian guys come up and each one puts his arms around him and gives him a kiss on both cheeks, Tommy dressed up, the two guys looking like they slept in their fucking clothes, cheap suits, no ties, both guys kind of fat. Nicky would tell how they spoke Italian to each other nonstop and Tommy never fucking once bothered to introduce him. Okay, then how they drove to a hotel in Milan, the Plaza on Piazza Diaz, where there were more people waiting to put their arms around Tommy and kiss him. A guy tried to take Tommy's picture and the fat guys smashed his camera and threw him out of the hotel, two cops in front watching the whole thing. The cops with white belts and holsters.

He'd tell how they went up to the suite reserved for Tommy, got out a few bottles and some ice and had a party, Nicky hanging around watching, listening to them speaking nothing but Italian till he said fuck it and went to his room down the hall. He stood at the window looking down at these orange streetcars going by the park. Or maybe they were buses.

He'd tell how Tommy called him up, said to come to his suite, Tommy alone now, empty glasses and full ashtrays all over, and ate him out for insulting his friends, walking out on them like that.

Nicky thought he was kidding. Come on -- nobody says a fucking word to him since he steps off the plane and he insulted them? This was some more of Tommy's bullshit from olden times, always talking about respect. Atlantic City, he had grown up on North Georgia, the same street where Nicodemo Scarfo lived, and had seen his guys all the time in the social club on Fairmount Avenue where he worked and made his first connections. The guys there had respect for Scarfo, naturally, but they didn't make a big fucking deal out of being Italian like Tommy did. There were people who worked for Jimmy who had no use for the Zip and had said in so many words they wouldn't mind seeing him taken out. The guy, it was like he was from another fucking planet.

Nicky said to him, "You gonna tell me what's going on or what?"

Tommy opened an athletic bag one of the Italian guys had brought and took out two Beretta nines and a couple boxes of cartridges and laid them on the table.

He said, "Harry's girlfriend came here yesterday and stayed one night at the Hotel Cavour. She ate dinner with a colored guy, an American, that Harry must have sent to meet her. The colored guy tried different ways to see if anybody was on her. Like he had her walk out of the hotel and then watched to see did anybody follow her. Then he drove around to the back of the restaurant and went in that way. Driving a gray Lancia my friends found out is registered to Harry Arno. He bought it last year and it's got a Milano plate on it. This other friend of mine, Benno, followed them this morning from here to a town south of Genova on the coast. Its name is Rapallo. Benno called my friends here, he said the colored guy left her at a hotel and took off. So far nobody's come to see her. Benno's going to watch the hotel and meet us in Rapallo tomorrow. The lady is at the Astoria. If we have to be there a day or two we going to stay in an apartment they have for me; it's more private. So, okay," Tommy said, "we get a car and go there a hundred miles an hour on the autostrada. We find Harry and I let you pop him. How you think about that?"

"I thought you're the one," Nicky said, "with the hard-on to do him."

"I'm giving him to you, Macho man, see how good you are."

"You think I can't?"

"That's what we find out."

The same as saying he didn't think Nicky had the nerve. That's what it sounded like and it pissed Nicky off. He began to imagine a setup where he could do Harry, turn around, and do Tommy. Pop him, ask him how he fucking thinks about it, and pop him again. Pull that off, it could get him made. He could see Jimmy Cap grinning. Hey, Joe Macho. Jimmy getting up out of his chair to give him a hug and a kiss on both cheeks.

Saturday, November 28, Raylan Givens stepped out of a taxi in front of the Central Station in Milan and thought the driver had made a mistake. It looked more like an art museum than a railroad station: the biggest one he'd ever seen, all marble and statues and full of different kinds of shops. Across the street was a Wendy's.

It was in this station Raylan got his first look at a pair of carabinieri with their swords, their shiny black boots, light-blue pants with a red stripe up the side, not looking too much like cops but that's what they were, in a military kind of way. Raylan walked over to them, took out his ID, and held it up to show his star. They looked at it, both of them taller than he was, without any kind of recognition or acknowledgment that he was in law enforcement the same as they were. Or more so.

"The Marshals Service," Raylan said. "I'm a deputy United States marshal. The same kind they used to have out in the wild West."

Both the carabinieri nodded at the star but didn't seem too impressed. But then with those swords and boots, why would they be?

Raylan said, "You guys ever use your swords? I wouldn't imagine, though, you run into too many offenders you can have sword fights with, huh?"

So much for trying a little humor. They didn't have any idea what he was talking about. Raylan touched the curved brim of his Stetson and went across the street to Wendy's to get a couple of burgers for the trip.

On the train there were three guys in the same compartment with him arguing about sports, a soccer game it sounded like, with a lot of emotion, waving their arms around. One had the sports section of a newspaper open and would read from it every now and then, it looked like to make his point. Raylan thought for a while they were going to end up in a fistfight. If they did, he'd stay out of it, leave the compartment if he had to, knowing he had to keep his nose clean. He'd brought along his Smith & Wesson Combat Mag, the gun he was most accurate with, also a snub-nosed Smith 357 he wore sometimes in his right boot, both down in the bottom of the suitcase he'd checked through on the flight. He'd left his Beretta at the office.

Looking out at the countryside he didn't see anything growing this time of year, the soil a color that reminded him some of Georgia, though not quite as red. There were more cornfields than he'd expected, rows of stubble. Dusty-looking olive trees with nets spread on the ground underneath. Lot of olive trees. The train would pass through tunnels in the hillsides and come out to more hills covered thick with trees, cypress, poplar, some oak, different kinds of palm trees. He saw his first aqueduct on the trip: it came down out of high country, stopped at the tracks and the autostrada, the freeway, and then picked up again, built most likely two thousand years ago. He had read about olive trees in Italy going back hundreds of years, villages up in the hills that hadn't changed much since the Middle Ages. It was an interesting, good-looking country with history you could look at, the old and the new, cops standing around with swords, some others at the airport with submachine guns.

They stopped in Genoa at suppertime and Raylan ate his two Wendy's while they sat there. Rapallo was next. If they ever got the train moving again it wouldn't take long to get there. It was already dark out, so he wouldn't see much tonight. A picture of Rapallo in his travel guide to Italy showed date palms along the beachfront and sidewalk cafes, a resort town of thirty thousand said to be popular summer and winter. He had picked out the Hotel Liguria -- named for the region Rapallo was in -- as not too expensive and phoned from Milan to make a reservation; at the last minute but no problem. Still, he didn't like getting in so late. The last one to arrive. Joyce would have come in yesterday, the Zip sometime this morning. So about a half hour from now, Raylan was thinking, everybody would be in Rapallo.

Chapter
Twelve.

Sunday, Raylan found out it was a city with commercial streets and residential neighborhoods up back of the postcard front it put on for tourists. Photos in the Guide to Rapallo he bought at the hotel showed date palms and flower gardens on the Via Veneto, coleus in bloom, young potted palms he wasn't sure were sabal or livistona. But there were city buses, too, traffic, and that big pink train station he came in at, all lit up last night.

Raylan had walked past the marina -- his guidebook called it the Tourist Harbor -- and the statue of Christopher Columbus before moving away from the beach to the Piazza Cavour he judged to be near the center of downtown, where the main church was located. (Only Nashville, he believed, had more churches than towns in Italy.) And came down to the beachfront again at the south end of the postcard bay where the cafes and crowds began to thin out: down where his guidebook said "the beaches were renowned for their elegant bathing establishments." He must've missed them. The book said that "in the antique quarter" you could "participate with enthusiasm in the daily life of artisan workshops." He must've missed those, too, or else they weren't open on Sunday.

Today he was more confident of finding Harry because when he asked at the hotel, by any chance was a Harry Arno registered there, the clerk said no, Mr. Arno had checked out Friday. Raylan was so surprised he said, "You serious?" and got a surprised look from the clerk. Harry, he found out, had been at the Liguria two weeks, up till just the day before yesterday. The clerk didn't know where he went. No, he hadn't said anything about leaving town. Raylan called hotels then and found Joyce Patton registered at the Astoria, but no Harry Arno. The operator, thinking he wanted to speak to her, connected him with her room. Raylan heard Joyce say "Hello?" in a quiet, tentative voice, and he hung up the phone. Then wondered if he should call her back, tell her to look out for the Zip. Sure the Zip was here by now. But when Raylan checked the hotels again he didn't find a Tomasino Bitonti or a Nicky Testa registered anywhere. He didn't recall this kind of situation being covered at the Glynco training center.

Raylan tiptoed around town hoping to run into Harry, find him buying The New York Times or having his breakfast somewhere. No luck. So now he'd have to walk along the Via Vittorio Veneto, the postcard part of town, where everybody was parading around or having their Sunday-morning coffee, sitting at sidewalk tables with their coats on. It was chilly, only partly sunny, somewhere in the high fifties, no one in swimming and only a few hardy souls on the beach.

He came to a garden, a bed of red salvia set off by a pair of black cannons and a couple of park benches. A plaque said it was the Ezra Pound Garden and it gave Raylan another boost of confidence, knowing Harry was around here, remembering Harry talking about Ezra Pound that time in Atlanta, part of his story. Part of the reason Harry was here; Raylan convinced of it. He got a book of Ezra Pound's poetry from the library after being with Harry that time and tried reading it, tried hard, but couldn't make sense of what the poet was trying to say. Cantos, with different numbers. He wondered to this day if Harry understood them.

He came to another plaque, this over the entrance to the Alle Rustico, a passageway through the building where, the plaque said:

HERE LIVED EZRA POUND AMERICAN POET in English and in Italian, here from 1924 to 1945 and with a stanza, it looked like, from one of his poems. Something about "To confess wrong without losing lightness" and some more that made even less sense. Raylan thinking, I don't know; maybe it's me.

He felt himself out in the open, easily spotted. Harry could see him first and hide, good at ducking out. But if he was going to be where people were, check what looked like the popular cafes, he'd have to risk it. He looked in at Vesuvio's then ahead to the next place, the Gran Caffe Rapallo, Raylan in the shade of the postcard buildings now and wishing he'd worn his raincoat over his suit, his light-tan one. A wind came up off the bay that felt moist and Raylan paused, turned his head, and set his Stetson down closer on his eyes. It was when he looked up again, ready to continue on, he saw Joyce Patton sitting at a table, a number of rows back, well underneath the awning. It was darker in there, but it was Joyce all right. She was watching the cars creeping by. Now she turned her head this way and Raylan saw her looking at him. Moments went by and she kept staring. Almost as though he had a light on her and she sat there fixed to the seat, not able to move.

That Sunday morning Robert Gee told Harry if he was going to live up here on top of the world the one thing he needed besides food was a telephone. Harry said, "If nobody knows where I am, they can't call me anyway. And anybody I want to call I can do it in town."

"Except you go down this time to phone," Robert Gee said, "you may as well go to the hotel and see her." He waited while Harry thought it over before he said, "Or, you sure you want to do it, take the chance, I'll bring your lady friend up here."

They were in the library of Harry's villa, three walls of books in Italian, the front wall French doors that opened on the garden: a view of privet hedges and plants in decorative clay pots, a few young orange trees, nothing but sky beyond a concrete railing. Harry, wearing a raincoat today, was pacing.