The Colombian Mule (15 page)

Tired of her insults, Celegato changed his tone. ‘You want to calm down. You're not in Colombia now, you know. We do business differently here. I can let you have the entire sum on delivery.'

Doña Rosa remained composed. ‘The day after tomorrow at the Tre Scalini restaurant in Portogruaro.'

‘Fine.'

‘I imagine you'd like to test the quality of the goods, right?'

‘Obviously.'

La Tía took a small silver box from her handbag. ‘Go to the toilets and have yourself a good snort.'

As soon as Celegato had disappeared, La Tía got up and made her way quickly to the kitchens and then out the back of the building. Old Rossini kept his gun trained on her till he was quite sure no one was following her. I helped her to climb on board and then radioed Max. ‘Everything went fine. We're out of here.'

 

La Tía's mule arrived the following day on a coach packed with pilgrims returning from Lourdes.

When Rossini and I walked into their hotel room, Aisa was busy extracting aluminium cigar tubes from statuettes of the Virgin Mary. Rosa Gonzales stashed five in the freezer compartment of the minibar and then emptied the contents of all the others into a plastic container. Aisa added crushed Naproxen Sodium tablets–normally used to treat headaches–until the quantity of coke La Tía had subtracted had been made up.

As soon as he saw what they were up to, Rossini burst out laughing. ‘You're ripping him off. You promised him eightyfive per cent pure coke.'

Doña Rosa shrugged her shoulders. ‘Yeah, well I need some samples for my new clients. Besides, he won't notice a thing. I've never met such an amateurish buyer.'

I lit a cigarette. The stench of the coke, resembling urine, was turning my stomach. ‘If he hadn't had the cops on his back, Celegato wouldn't have been in such a hurry to reach an agreement, or so willing to bend over backwards. They're in one hell of a hurry to get their hands on the goods. I'm really curious to know what they'll use them for.'

Within a couple of minutes, Aisa's and Doña Rosa's expert fingers had packaged the drug in plastic sachets, each weighing approximately 100 grams, which they then hid in a box of dog biscuits.

I took the box and placed it under my arm. ‘We'll take charge of the handover. And as soon as we can, we'll bring you your money.'

‘Don't keep me waiting too long. I'm short of cash.'

Rossini smirked. ‘Don't tell me you've already got through that roll you had stashed in the chair leg.'

La Tía shook her head in disappointment. ‘Searching our room displays a real lack of respect.'

‘We're truly sorry. We didn't realize we were dealing with such a sensitive flower.'

 

The waiter was going from table to table waving a cordless phone and asking the diners if there was a Signor Roberto present. Celegato raised his arm.

‘Hola,' said La Tía.

‘The other day, you just vanished.'

‘Playing it safe, hombre, that's all.'

‘And today you're late.'

‘Actually, no, I'm not. I've decided we'll do the handover another way.'

‘Why? You were the one who wanted the meeting here.'

‘And now I want it someplace else. I never met you before and, for all I know, you could have turned up with the drug squad in tow.'

‘I'm on my own,' Celegato snarled.

‘So much the better. I left a package at the bar for you. You'll find it contains a radio-transmitter. Take the autostrada for Mestre and switch it on. Someone will get in touch, don't worry.'

Max and I were waiting in the toll plaza. As soon as we saw Celegato's yellow Saab flash past, closely followed by the cops' Fiat Ducato, we started tailing them, Max driving my Skoda while I took Beniamino's car.

Meanwhile, twenty kilometers away, Rossini was waiting on an overpass.

I called him on his cell phone. ‘Celegato's on his way—and he's not alone.'

Then I took hold of the radio-transmitter tuned to the one Celegato had picked up at the restaurant.

‘Roberto?'

‘Yeah?'

‘In a few minutes you'll come to overpass number thirty-nine. Pull onto the shoulder as soon as you've passed it, take the case containing the cash, get out of your car and await further instructions.'

Celegato did exactly what he had been told, while the Fiat Ducato continued for another 150 meters before pulling over and hiding in an unlit rest area. Max and I stopped our cars a short distance before the overpass and observed the scene through binoculars.

Celegato walked back along the hard shoulder looking up at the overpass, and stopped the moment he saw Rossini, wearing a balaclava and armed with a hunting rifle, suddenly appear at the railing above him. Using a length of cord, Rossini lowered the small ivory-colored bag containing the cocaine. Celegato took the bag, opened it, produced a switchblade, and pushed it into one of the sachets of coke. He tasted the drug with the tip of his tongue, running it over his gums. He then attached his briefcase to the cord. Rossini hauled up the case, checked its contents, and signaled to Celegato that he was free to go.

Max drove off to tail Celegato, while I stopped under the overpass to pick up Old Rossini. So far everything had worked like a dream.

Cars were passing at such speed that nobody could have gotten a clear picture of anything happening on the ground. The overpass trick was getting a bit old, but it was still pretty neat. You could monitor what was going on from above, and if anything went wrong you had a clear escape route. Ever since a series of morons with nothing to do on Saturday nights had taken to hurling rocks onto passing cars, the highways authority had numbered the overpasses. This had made things much easier, enabling us to tell the dealer precisely where to pull up. Max the Memory had come up with a good plan.

I didn't have to wait long before I saw Rossini squeezing through a gap in the wire netting he had cut an hour or so earlier. He chucked the rifle and the money on the back seat and removed his balaclava. ‘Move over, I'll drive,' he said.

I was happy to let him take the wheel, and called Max.

‘What's happening?'

‘It's all under control. The van's doing about a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, so it's easy to follow. Take over from me in about ten kilometers . . . Hang on a sec . . . they're slowing down . . . Shit . . . they're turning off, taking the Cessalto exit.'

‘You go straight ahead. We'll take it from here.'

When we reached the Cessalto toll plaza, we saw Celegato's Saab and the white police van parked just the other side of the toll booths. We didn't want to drive past them so, to gain time, Beniamino pretended he had mislaid his wallet and asked the drowsy tollbooth attendant to bear with him. We saw Stefano Giaroli, the Guardia di Finanza marshal whose flat we had searched, get out of the van, walk over to the Saab, and climb in alongside Celegato. They then got back onto the autostrada, travelling in the opposite direction, heading towards Udine. The van took off along a smaller road to Treviso. We quickly found our money, paid up, and tailed the Saab. We couldn't get too close, so I kept my eyes riveted on their tail lights, using a pair of twilight-factor luminosity Steiner binoculars that Max had lent me.

I asked Max to catch up with us. Another car might come in useful. When they left the autostrada at Udine, there was no longer any room for doubt as to their destination.

Rossini fiddled with his bracelets. ‘They're heading for Gia­roli's place for a little nap.'

I put the binoculars back in their stiff rubber case. ‘This means we'll have to tail them tomorrow as well.'

‘When Max gets here, we'll dump the rifle and the cash in the Skoda and park it right alongside the Carabinieri headquarters, just to be sure no car radio thieves get any bright ideas. Then the three of us can make ourselves comfortable under Giaroli's condo and wait till they take off again with the drugs.'

‘What if they split up?'

‘We follow whoever's got the coke.'

 

It was during Max's watch, at about six-thirty, that Celegato and Giaroli came out of the main door of the building. Celegato, carrying the canvas bag containing the coke, got into the Saab and moved off. Giaroli followed him in his dark-blue Clio. It was a freezing cold morning and the roads were covered in ice and jammed with cars and trucks. We succeeded in tailing Celegato and Giaroli without drawing attention to ourselves or ever completely losing sight of them.

From Udine they headed north, and after a few kilometers drove into the village of Tricesimo. For a moment, we had been worried they might be making for the Austrian border. Celegato pulled up outside the village primary school. Giaroli hung back, halting roughly fifty meters from the school, on the opposite side of the road. Max, Rossini and I had no choice but to follow developments from a considerable distance, through the powerful zoom lens on Max's videocamera. It was just before seven.

A woman arrived on a bicycle. She stopped next to the yellow Saab, took the canvas bag from Celegato and placed it in the basket on her handlebars, then calmly pushed her bike over to the school gate and unlocked it. Celegato's Saab then disappeared around a bend, followed by Giaroli in his Clio.

‘They've gone. They must be using the school janitor as a courier,' Max remarked as he put the videocamera back in its case. ‘Which means that, unlike us, they must already know exactly where the coke is headed. We're going to have to keep tracking it, I'm afraid.'

Old Rossini surveyed our surroundings. ‘There's no way we can stay here. Tricesimo is just a village and we'd attract attention. And we certainly can't follow her in a car. We're going to have to use a bicycle.'

At that point I asked the wrong question. ‘Which one of us is going to pedal his way through this freezing cold?'

My two associates turned towards me with an identical smirk.

‘Why me? I haven't been on a bike since I was a kid.'

‘You're the best athlete,' Beniamino joked. ‘And the youngest,' Max added. Then they burst out laughing.

We drove through the village and on to Tarcento where I bought a mountain bike with every imaginable accessory. I rode it a couple of times around the square just to get used to the way it handled. We returned to Tricesimo with the bike in the trunk and, at midday, when the kids came out, I started cycling up and down.

A quarter of an hour later, the caretaker locked the school gate and got on her bike. I followed her, leaving a distance of about thirty meters between us. She stopped to buy some bread and then headed towards the outskirts of the village. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Giaroli's blue Clio parked up a side road. The woman's house couldn't be far off.

Twenty or thirty meters further on, the woman stopped at an old, tastefully renovated farmhouse surrounded by a large garden. A big, long-haired dog lolloped up to greet her, wagging its tail. She stroked and patted it as she closed the gate behind her.

I couldn't hang around there. Giaroli might see me from where he was parked. Searching for a place from which to keep an eye on the farmhouse I noticed a large abandoned villa a bit further up the hill. I rode up to it, leant the bike against the back wall and climbed in through a window. It was empty and clearly hadn't been lived in for a long time. I went upstairs and found a room that, using the binoculars Max had given me, provided a clear view over both the farmhouse and Giaroli's car.

I called Max, explained the situation, and we agreed to check in every half hour. The intense cold was becoming unbearable and I had to make frequent recourse to a bottle of Calvados that I'd had the foresight to bring along.

At two-thirty in the afternoon, a red Seat Córdoba pulled up at the farmhouse. A well-built though not particularly tall man got out of the car, unlocked the gate, and crossed the garden. The woman greeted him with a hug and then a kiss on the mouth. He took off his cap and responded with passion. For a fraction of a second, a Guardia di Finanza badge glinted in the sun. I refocused my binoculars on his uniform to discover his rank: he was a marshal. The dog nosed its way between the two lovers and the man patted it. I refocused on the dark-blue Clio. From a reflection inside Giaroli's car it was clear he was photographing the touching scene.

I swore through clenched teeth. Things were beginning to make sense. Mixed up in this whole mess, there was now this Guardia di Finanza marshal who at some point had started playing for the other team. This was going to make everything a whole lot more complicated, not just for us but for Corradi too: it was clear he was just an expendable pawn in a game where he didn't know the rules.

I was now looking at a cops-on-cops job. If we let ourselves get caught in the crossfire of a special operation involving police and Finanza, it could cost us our freedom, everything. The only sensible thing to do was to beat an orderly retreat and leave Nazzareno to his fate. The trouble was that Beniamino and Max would never agree to that. And nor could I.

I took a long swig of Calvados and lit a cigarette. I was just so fucking terrified of going back to prison, and wondered what the hell I could do to stave off that fear. ‘Stick it up your ass' I told myself angrily. I would never make it through another spell in prison but I had known that all along. The day I walked free, I swore I would never go back. But Corradi had never had anything to do with coke trafficking and there was no way he deserved to die in prison just to satisfy a cop's appetite for revenge. He had been tried and cleared for the killing of the two patrolmen in Caorle and that was that. The cops should stick to the rules. Apart from that, as an investigator, once you've taken on a case, you can't just walk away. Then there was Corradi's girl: Victoria didn't deserve to lose her man forever. I had no option. These were the cards I had been dealt and I would have to play them as best I could. To hell with the cops and magistrates.