The Colombian Mule (21 page)

Nazzareno waited a few seconds, then turned towards Bonotto and shook his head.

‘Forgive me, your honor. The defense counsel has decided not to interrogate this witness.'

Celegato, as pale as death, was led out, his head bowed.

‘Does the defense wish to call any other witness evidence?'

‘No, your honor.'

 

The trial itself was held a couple of months later. The proceedings lasted two days, at the end of which the defendant was convicted and sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment.

I heard the outcome of the trial on the evening news, and knocked on Max's door.
‘Fourteen years,' I said.

‘We did what we could, Marco.'

‘I don't know.'

‘But we did. It's this country that has lost any sense of where truth lies. Maybe it never had it.'

‘Whose side are we on, Max?'

‘The side of the innocent.'

‘I never really doubted it, but I'm happy to hear you say it.'

 

That evening I went back to the sandwich-bar to see Virna. She was wearing her hair in a new way and had put on a few kilos. To me she looked incredibly beautiful.

‘I miss you, Virna,' I said softly as she brought me a glass of Calvados. I hadn't ordered anything and Calvados wasn't on the list of drinks available. Maybe she had put a bottle aside, waiting for me to come back. In any case, right then, that's what I wanted to believe.

‘I miss you,' I repeated. She surveyed me at length, without a word. Then she resumed serving the other tables. I stayed until the place closed, trying not to overdo it with the drink and thinking about what I could possibly do to win her back. I couldn't resign myself to the idea of losing her for ever.

I walked her to her car. ‘I'd like to see you again.'

‘We could go out one evening for dinner,' she suggested, to my great surprise. ‘I want to explain to you why I left.'

‘I've got things to say to you, too.'

She caressed my face, then went home alone. Without me. The following day, Beniamino dropped by to see Max and me, bearing caviar and Cuban cigars. ‘I had a bit of trouble at sea last night,' he began to relate. ‘Two motorboats from the Guardia di Finanza started following me, and when they realized I was losing them, they opened fire with a twenty millimeter light cannon. It's all the fault of those smugglers down in Puglia. Those nuts are prepared to declare open war on the Guardia di Finanza, all for four lousy crates of cigarettes.'

I offered him a glass of his favorite vodka. ‘They're not smugglers, those people,' I said. ‘They're mafiosi, Southern Italian mobsters with bases all over Montenegro.'

‘You're right there, Marco, they're not really smugglers at all. Real smuggling is like cops and robbers. You run and the Finanza runs after you. Whoever runs faster wins. No violence on either side.'

Max prepared a slap-up lunch: yellow pumpkin risotto followed by baccalà alla vicentina. At the end of the meal, Rossini blew the smoke of a Montecristo number five into his glass of cognac. ‘I've got news of Celegato.'

‘Tell us about it, partner.'

‘It appears someone has been spreading rumours about Victoria among Colombian nightclub hostesses. A word here and a word there, with the result that Celegato found out she's gone back home. But the most interesting thing is that a few days ago our dear old friend Bruno confided in Toni Baeta, the barber, that he's planning to make a trip to Colombia in the near future.'

Max guffawed and raised his glass to Rossini. ‘I wonder who'd be spreading rumours like that, eh?'

I shook my head. ‘If he goes to Bogotá, he's a dead man. If La Tía's killers don't get him, those in the pay of the prostitution rackets sure as hell will.'

Beniamino picked up the box of cigars, lifted the lid and held it out to me. I chose the lightest in color, ran it under my nose, clipped the end, and lit it with a long wooden match. The spirals of smoke were white and dense. They reminded me of fog. And winter.

This book is dedicated to a friend, a dear friend. The story of Nazzareno Corradi is his story. At sixty years of age, though innocent as charged, he is serving a long prison sentence for international narcotics trafficking. He was unwilling to play by the rules of the law, so the name that could have thrown open the prison gates never left his lips. He preferred to remain loyal to his lifelong principles. I am proud of his silence. It wasn't for him to speak, but for justice to do its work.

Having a friend in prison is like having a friend who is dead but who perhaps one day will return from the grave and re-enter your life. While waiting, I have put aside a bottle of ‘venerable' Calvados, and in my garden I have planted an oak tree to give him the strength to go on. Small, senseless gestures to keep old nightmares at bay.

Along with a few others, I did what I could to help him. It made no difference. Even though there was no evidence. And even though my friend's rooted aversion to drugs was well known.

We met in jail. We were all ‘long-stay' prisoners. Some of us had the words ‘RELEASE DATE: NEVER' stamped in red ink on our files. A number of the prisoners in our section had links to the usual lousy mafia-style organizations and had set up a heroin-trafficking ring. Corrupt guards brought the stuff into the prison and these guys peddled it. It was straightforward and lucrative.

We told them we wanted nothing to do with it. For a variety of reasons, drug-dealers and heroin pissed us off. There were three of us: me, my friend, and a guy from Verona who was both a poet and a murderer. It was a rough time. We became friends watching each others' backs at shower time. Two of us would wash while the third stood guard, a bathrobe rolled round his left arm and the handle of a frying-pan, filed to razor sharpness, clasped in his right hand.

In the end we managed to force a negotiation, and everything was resolved by a series of internal transfers. Somebody, however, took the view that we had broken some unwritten law, and the poet from Verona ended up paying for all three of us. One day he said a word too many and thereby wrote his own death sentence. We realized this immediately, and my friend and I have always thought that he did it on purpose. Remorse had already killed him some time earlier. A couple of years later he was released on probation, and then he disappeared. His body was discovered in the Adige river. His wife recognized him from a tattoo on the big toe of his right foot.

If a person's word counted for anything in the courts of Italy, I would have appeared before the judges and told them what happened in prison all those years ago. But it doesn't. So it remains just a story. One of many.

Massimo Carlotto is one of the best known living crime writers in Europe. In addition to the many titles in his extremely popular “Alligator” series, and his stand-alone noir novels, he is also the author of The Fugitive, in which he tells the story of his arrest and trial for a crime he didn't commit, and his subsequent years on the run. Carlotto's novel
The Goodbye Kiss
was a finalist for the MWA's Edgar Award for Best Novel.