The Colombian Mule (2 page)

‘A bit too strong for me. I'm not much of a drinker,' the lawyer said, ordering a port.

I noticed his cell phone. ‘Doesn't happen to be GSM, does it?' I asked.

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Better hand it to the girl,' I said, nodding at Virna to come over.

Bonotto stared at me in surprise.

‘It seems the police can listen in on people via their cell phones. Provided they know your number, obviously. You might as well be wired.'

‘I can switch it off.'

‘Well, that's just the point, you can't. It goes on transmitting, even when turned off. You have to remove the battery and card if you want to disable it. We'll keep it for you at the bar. It's simpler.'

‘What is this, the latest urban myth?'

‘It seems it's true. Anyway, there's no point risking it. In fact, you ought to consider banning cell phones from your office.'

The lawyer tasted his port.

‘I'm acting on behalf of Nazzareno Corradi,' he began. ‘He was arrested about ten days ago, the twenty-sixth of December to be exact. I'm going to need some help to get him out of jail.'

‘What's the indictment?'

‘International trafficking in narcotics.'

‘What variety?'

‘Cocaine. Eight hundred grams.'

I lit a cigarette. ‘Tricky,' I remarked. ‘These days the judges are cracking down.'

‘At sixty, the chances are he'll die inside.'

I looked Bonotto in the eye. ‘You've never defended a drug trafficker so I take it you're convinced your client's innocent. Besides, if you weren't convinced, you wouldn't be here. Everybody knows I don't work for drug dealers.'

‘Corradi's clean,' Bonotto reassured me. ‘I've known him for years. He used to be a thief, banks, but, on account of his age, he has now turned exclusively to smuggling works of art.'

I checked my glass and settled back, ready for a long and convoluted story. ‘So how did he get mixed up with coke?'

The lawyer scratched at his immaculately shaven cheek. I could smell his expensive aftershave.

‘At two in the morning, Corradi received a phone call. He was with friends in Treviso, at their place, playing a friendly game of poker. A voice he didn't recognize informed him that his woman, Victoria Rodriguez Gomez, a Colombian, was in room thirty-seven of the Pensione Zodiaco in Jesolo, where a friend of hers was staying, and that she had been taken ill. Corradi tried to reach her on her cell phone but kept getting a user unavailable message. He jumped in his car and raced to the hotel. There was no one at the desk so he went straight up to the first floor. But when he knocked on the door, a guy with a moustache and slicked-back hair opened up and yelled at him in Spanish to run for it. My client decided he had better find the night porter, but just as he turned round police leapt out from every corner and arrested him.

‘The guy in the room turned out to be a Colombian by the name of Guillermo Arías Cuevas. He had been stopped at five o'clock that evening as he came through Venice airport with eight hundred grams of coke in his belly. He had cooperated with the police at once, giving them the address of the hotel, but the description he gave of the Italian who had contacted him in Colombia didn't match Corradi. The statement described a man of about fifty, medium-height, thick-set and with light brown hair, whereas my client is ten years older, almost totally bald, taller and thinner.'

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It doesn't mean a thing. Maybe the Colombian lied. I've never yet met a snitch who told the truth.'

The lawyer threw his arms out wide. ‘Either way, my client fell into a trap. He thought he was going to pick up his woman but instead ran into a bunch of cops who are now accusing him of being the mule's Italian contact.'

‘So where was his woman?'

‘In a lap-dance joint in Eraclea, visiting her girlfriends. It's where she and Corradi first got acquainted.'

‘Why did she have her cell phone switched off ?'

‘She didn't. The joint's in a basement. There's no signal.'

I motioned to Virna to bring me another drink. ‘What have they got on him?'

‘Just the fact that he knocked on the mule's door.'

‘Well, if you think about it, that's quite a lot. What does the judge make of Corradi's protestation of innocence?'

‘He doesn't buy it. He spelled it out for me. Even setting aside my client's previous offences, the fact that he has a relationship with a Colombian dancer and that they have made numerous trips to Bogotá to visit her parents makes it really unlikely that he was at the hotel by coincidence or mistake.'

‘What about the phone call that lured him to the trap?'

‘It was made from a callbox in Mestre. The judge and investigators take the view that as a lead it isn't even worth looking into.'

‘What of the friends he was playing poker with? They must have overheard the conversation.'

‘They're all ex-cons with records as long as your arm.'

‘What's the judge like?'

‘Pisano. A good man. He's open to argument and respects the defense's right to a fair trial. He might seem like the ideal judge. The thing is he has no particular interest in investigation. He just goes along with whatever the police hand him. He'll probably wait for a while and then pass the case on up the line.'

‘Then it looks like your client's fucked,' I remarked.

‘If he goes to the preliminary hearing with nothing but what we've got right now, then yes, he's fucked for sure. Nowadays trials in Italy are won or lost at the investigation stage. By the time they go to trial, it's too late. You're his only hope of not dying behind bars.'

‘I don't see quite what I'm supposed to do.'

‘My client is the fall guy in some kind of conspiracy. We need to find out who set him up and why.'

‘Have you any firm leads?'

‘Just a feeling. Arías Cuevas was initially arrested by Venice airport cops. But then the special narcotics units of both the police and the Guardia di Finanza suddenly piled in. That's really unusual for what was, basically, a low-level operation. Added to that, it turns out that the police were acting under the command of Commissario Nunziante, a sworn enemy of my client ever since that jeweler's store robbery in Caorle.'

‘Remind me.'

‘There was some shooting, two cops were killed and Corradi was indicted. At the trial I managed to get him off, pleading insufficient evidence. But Nunziante swore to take revenge.'

I took a cigarette out and played with it a bit before lighting it. ‘You were right to call it just a feeling. It's not much to go on. Besides, as the man said, there are too many Colombian coincidences.'

Bonotto gave me a worried look.

‘You're not telling me you're refusing the case . . .'

I raised a hand to interrupt him. ‘I'm just saying that before I accept the job, I want to be convinced your client's innocent. But not of course at my expense.'

‘All right.' The lawyer took a yellow envelope from his jacket pocket.

I counted the notes. ‘Fine. Does your client realize that if I take the case, it'll cost him real money? On top of expenses, I'll have to take account of the risks involved.'

Bonotto smiled, got up and began to put on his overcoat.

‘As a matter of fact, I don't come cheap either. But professional criminals like Corradi are prudent men—they have to be. I'm confident the legal fund he has set aside for just such eventualities as these will cover our fees.'

‘Whose idea was it to come to me? Yours or your client's?'

‘It was my idea.'

‘And what did he say?'

‘Just that he trusted my judgment.' Bonotto picked up his cell phone from the bar and left.

Virna came and sat at my table. ‘New job?' she asked.

‘Could be,' I said. ‘You're tired,' I added, looking at her face.

She smiled. ‘Not too tired to ask you back to my place when the club closes.'

I smiled back. ‘Okay.'

‘So don't overdo the drink,' she said, heading back to wait at the tables.

Virna was my girl. Her real name was Giovanna but, owing to a passing resemblance to Virna Lisi in a famous toothpaste ad, everybody called her Virna. She was forty and had the charged expression and abrupt manner of someone whose life had not been easy. I liked her a lot. She loved me. All in all, we got along fine, even if she was a little too keen to organize my life and stop me drinking.

I got to know her when she first came to work at the club as a waitress. Like everybody else, she thought the joint belonged to Rudy Scanferla, the barman, whereas in fact it was mine. Rudy had kindly agreed to manage it for the sake of our long friendship, not to mention the excellent wages I paid him. It was a few kilometers outside Padova in a small town that, like so many others, had sprung up thirty years earlier along the main road and was now basking in north-eastern Italy's economic miracle.

The club opened at eight in the evening and closed at four in the morning. Customers called it La Cuccia. It was warm, welcoming and discreet: a good place to sit, drink, chew the fat and hear good music–blues, mainly, my favorite kind of music. Not long ago, a singer, Eloisa Deriu, had turned up with a voice that could range from operatic arias to blues and jazz, and who had so much talent that somehow I never found the courage to tell her that before she came along nothing but blues had ever been heard at La Cuccia. I too had once been a singer, though not in Eloisa's league. But I had taken to heart the old saying that ‘you can take the blues out of alcohol but you can't take alcohol out of the blues' and I would get up on stage with a few drinks inside me, and my voice would ring out as warm and moist as marsh mist. My group was called the Old Red Alligators and we even had a fan club. In fact it was my admirers who gave me the nickname Alligator. Those had been good times. But then I wound up in prison and by the time I got out my voice had dried up. After seven years of silence, all that was left was my nickname and a longing to listen. In prison I had become a skillful peacemaker, moving easily between the various criminal gangs. So when I got out I started working for lawyers who needed an entrée into organized crime to get their clients out of trouble.

I had two associates. Beniamino Rossini, also known as Old Rossini to distinguish him from his many brothers, was one of the few surviving members of the old-style criminal underworld. His mother, of Basque descent, had been a legendary smuggler and Rossini had started out, no more than a kid, helping her to move contraband goods over the Swiss border. Later he specialized in multi-million dollar robberies. His last big job had gone wrong, and the two of us had met up in prison, where I had had the pleasure of helping him out of a delicate situation involving a group of Neapolitan Camorristi.

Now Rossini was rich, fiftyish, and lived in a house by the sea at Punta Sabbioni, where he devoted his energies to smuggling goods from nearby Dalmatia: weapons, gold, caviar, girls, and people in trouble with the law. There was nothing that obliged him to help me with my investigations. He did it on account of our friendship and because he liked getting into trouble. He had a gut loathing for the new-style underworld, full of snitches and dope-peddlers, and often the cases that I worked on gave him the opportunity to settle old scores. He lived with Sylvie, a French-Algerian belly dancer. She was a fine-looking woman of about forty, with blue eyes, amber-colored skin, a resolute character, a husky smoker's voice and a genuine passion for motorbikes.

My other associate was Max the Memory, or Fat Max. He had recently got out of prison, thanks to a pardon from the Italian President. The clemency motion had actually been the result of an agreement negotiated with an anti-mafia judge whom I had had no hesitation in blackmailing. Max had been avoiding the police for a long time, owing to a matter that dated back to the Seventies. At that time, he had been in charge of counterinformation for a Far Left group and had run a whole network of informants who spied on everything and everybody.

Then, in the Eighties, several turncoats had accused him of passing information to groups engaged in armed struggle and he had been forced underground. Everyone just assumed he was in France, but in fact he hadn't left the city. Holed up in safe houses, rarely venturing out, he just went on gathering information. I used him as an analyst in a couple of investigations I was working on at that time, and his assistance proved absolutely decisive. To get in touch with him, you had to go through his woman, Marielita, a Uruguayan street musician. As it turned out, she died in my arms, killed by a hit man acting on orders from the local Brenta Mafia. Old Rossini had then gone in and restored a modicum of balance. After he got his pardon, Max moved into one of the two flats I'd had built above the club.

I looked up at the ceiling and pictured Max sitting at his desk, busily entering data in his computer or surfing the net. Later, as always, he would come down for a drink. Like everyone else, he had his vices. His fingers were yellow with nicotine and he had a hefty beer gut. Come to think of it, the only one of us in good shape was Old Rossini, with his trim and taut physique. That was the way it should be: it was his job to show some muscle. The only thing that rang a bit false was his old-fashioned moustache à la Xavier Cugat which, like the few remaining hairs on his head, had clearly been dyed.

I popped behind the counter, picked up a clean cell phone and left the club.

‘Ciao, Marco,' Rossini replied at once.

‘Are you busy?' I asked.

‘I've got to pick up Sylvie from the nightclub at three.'

I looked at my watch. It was 10:30. ‘How soon can you get here?'

‘About an hour.'

‘I'll wait for you at Max's.'

 

While Max the Memory had been in prison, I had stocked his flat with anonymous furniture bought from a local manufacturer during one of their periodic clearance sales. With his shrewd eye for pictures, carpets and lamps, Max had somehow managed to make the place warm and comfortable. Every time I walked in I couldn't help being reminded that the only personal touch in my flat was my record collection.