A Pimp's Notes (40 page)

Successful lawyer Ugo Biondi, with his leather briefcase, standing next to a desk that cost several million lire, in his centrally located and beautifully decorated law office, is disconcerted.

I, with my dark brown envelope in my hand, am happy.

23

The Alfa Romeo Giulietta hums along Viale della Liberazione at a reasonable speed.

All around us Milan is lit up and ready to celebrate yet another nocturnal ritual. The usual characters of the night will be on the move. The wealthy, the misfits, the cops, the crooks, the artists, the whores. Sometimes the faces change, but the roles remain the same. It’s always hard to tell just who’s who. I’m the slight exception to that rule. Things in my life have hurtled forward at the speed of light. For the rest of the world, one short week has passed. For me, years have sped by.

Too much blood, too many dead bodies, too much naked reality.

Which is exactly what I’m going to confront.

The whole way, Stefano Milla has driven almost as if he were practicing for his learner’s permit, as if he were afraid to commit some minor infraction that might attract the attention of one of his fellow policemen. The presence of the lawyer made him decide not to tell me any details about his phone call to Tano Casale. The unexpected side trip, which I told him about only when Biondi and I got in the car, added to his existing anxiety.

The nails he was sitting on have now been transformed into daggers.

We turn onto Via Cartesio and we stop at the corner of Piazza della Repubblica. On our right are the trees that screen the main façade of the Hotel Principe e Savoia like a small verdant park.

I open the car door.

From the backseat, Ugo expresses a thought out loud that I know has been echoing through Milla’s brain.

“Bravo, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Oh, yes: one hundred percent.”

The actual percentage of confidence that I feel is much lower than that. But there are things you’ve been waiting your whole life to do. Sometimes even a lifetime isn’t long enough. When the time comes, there’s nothing for it but to go along for the ride. This is one of those times. And, after all, the future is in the hands of the gods, which isn’t actually much of a guarantee.

I get out of the car and I walk unhurriedly up the ramp to the main entrance of the hotel. There’s plate glass and wood and stucco. The lamps inside the hotel pour their light out onto the roundabout where cars stop to unload travelers’ luggage. The air is filled with the scent of playthings and perfume. In places like this hotel, when evening falls you always have the impression that you’re living in a perennial Christmas.

On either side of the entrance a couple of police patrol cars are parked, something that always happens when an important person is staying at the hotel. The policemen are sitting in their cars on upholstery of pure boredom. One officer glances at me through his open window as I walk up to the front door. A bored look, then he goes to back to his conversation with his partner.

Maybe they’re discussing the violent events that have put law enforcement officials and the police on red alert across the country. Or perhaps they’re just calculating that even if they took a whole month’s salary, they couldn’t afford to spend a weekend in the hotel they’re guarding.

As I walk through the front door, I muse that there are two things in the world that are difficult to master: boredom and fear.

I go over to the reception desk, where a clerk in uniform is gazing with some distaste at my rumpled clothing, my leather jacket, and my scraggly beard. All the same, he’s still courteous and formal. Not out of respect for me, but respect for himself.

“
Buona sera
. Is there something I can do for you?”

I can read in his eyes the words that he’d really like to use.

Why don’t you turn your ass around, stop scuffing up the carpet, and get out of here, you filthy bum
?

It’s typical of small people who are given small powers. Strong with the weak, weak with the strong. Kiss up, kick down. He would be dismayed if he could read my mind and find out how little I care about him. As far as I’m concerned he can go fuck himself, but I’m still courteous and formal. I’m being ironic toward myself, not toward him.

“There certainly is something that you can do for me. I know that Senator Sangiorgi is staying here. I have an envelope to deliver to him. Personally.”

He looks me up and down as if I’d asked him to heft my travel bag and guess its weight.

“Signore, I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I’m sure you can understand why. If you’d like to give it to me, I’ll make sure it reaches him. The senator has—”

I break in. I guess I’ll never know what the senator has.

“Call the senator or his assistant right now and tell him that Nicola Sangiorgi is in the lobby and would like to come up.”

The name causes a slight shift in attitude. Still, it might be a case of a simple coincidence, involving identical surnames. He takes care to make sure that such is not the case.

“Do you have family ties with the senator?”

“Abundant family ties.”

I let a pause fall, a pause that’s more than ten years long.

“I’m his son.”

It’s been a lifetime since I uttered those words. To my ears, they land on the marble counter with quite a thump. Evidently to the ears of the clerk, too, because he suddenly puts on a new expression.

“Could you excuse me for a moment?”

“Why, absolutely.”

He moves away to the far end of the counter. He picks up a receiver, dials an extension, and talks to someone. It must be an important person, because he keeps bobbing his head submissively.

When he comes back all that’s left is courtesy.

“Would you care to be so kind as to wait right here, Signore Sangiorgi?”

“Certainly. I would indeed care to be so kind as to wait right here.”

I believe that he’s so caught up in his exquisite manners that he doesn’t even notice that I’m mocking him brutally. I walk a short distance away. There’s a nice scent in the air, the warmth of velvet on the sofas, and the glittering pomp of gilt paint is everywhere. But there’s the sense of the ephemeral and fleeting that no hotel, even the finest hotel in the universe, can ever completely disguise. Whatever the thread count of the sheets you sleep between, the variety of hardwood in the chairs you sit on, the price of the champagne you sip, and the hourly rate of the women you invite upstairs, a hotel room is still just a hotel room.

A middle-aged man of less than average height, with salt-and-pepper hair and beard and a dark brown suit

My God, how I hate dark brown

emerges from behind a column and clearly scans the room for me. He spots me and moves across the lobby in my direction. A cluster of foreign visitors leaving the hotel cross his path, and he slows his pace. The women are dressed in evening gowns, the men are dressed in tuxedos. Maybe they’re going to La Scala, or maybe they’re just going to get fucked in the ass somewhere, for all I care. I wish I could throw a water balloon full of shit at them, big enough to turn all of them, including the face of the guy walking toward me, dark brown.

When he reaches me, he’s forced to tip his head back to look at me. He doesn’t seem too pleased about that. His voice has a Sicilian accent, which I’m not accustomed to hearing used in the pronunciation of my name anymore.

“Are you Nicola Sangiorgi?”

“In the flesh.”

He extends his hand.

“A pleasure to meet you. My name is Enrico Della Donna. Your father, the senator, does the honor of bestowing his trust on me.”

Which is to say: I’m his secretary and personal assistant and I lick his ass every time he tells me to.

I shake the extended hand without much enthusiasm. I’m practically certain that he’s even less enthusiastic than I am.

“You’re a little different than the pictures I’ve seen in your father’s home. You’re grown up, you’ve become a man.”

I don’t think he expects an answer. In any case, I wouldn’t have given him one.

“If you’d care to follow me.”

I would care to follow him. So I do.

Della Donna leads the way down a hallway lined with soft carpeting. The wallpaper is seemly and bright.

He walks like a servant. I walk like a confident fugitive who is no longer afraid.

“I was told by the senator that you now work in Latin America. It’s certainly commendable to try to make one’s way in the world through one’s own efforts. There aren’t many people who would have had the courage to choose the more daunting path, in your situation.”

We reach the end of the hallway. The man upon whom my father the senator does the honor of bestowing his trust completes another of his important tasks. He pushes the elevator button.

And he goes on talking.

“I imagine you hurried back to Italy when you learned of the terrible fate that was visited upon your uncle. Such a horrifying thing. We are staying here in Milan until the judicial authorities issue a clearance for his burial. If we’d had advance notice, we would certainly have sent a driver to pick you up at the airport.”

I have no idea how much he knows about my personal history, because I don’t know the extent of the trust that has been bestowed upon him. The general logic of the things he says is leaky as hell, but there’s no one on earth quite like a politician’s personal assistant when it comes to believing things he has a vested interest in believing.

We step into the elevator and, in accordance with that odd ritual that seems to govern elevators all over the planet, we ride in complete silence. The walls of the cabin are sheathed in wood, with darker moldings that appear to be briarwood. The back panel of the elevator is a mirror, to greet and welcome the reflections of the passengers.

The elevator stops at the floor requested.

Della Donna steps out into the hallway to show me the way.

I stay in the elevator. I raise a hand to beg his pardon.

“Please excuse me for a moment.”

“Of course.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out a bunch of keys.

I choose the sharpest one.

Then, with utter calm and a steady hand, I carve two phrases into the beautiful glistening wood:

Luca is a faggot
.

Mary is a whore
.

Anyone who reads it will just have to trust me, because I’ve forgotten the phone numbers.

Della Donna refrains from commenting. I feel sure he’s commenting in his head. He’s free to do so, it doesn’t cost a cent. If we were to lock up all the people who ever dreamed of murdering someone, we’d have to turn the Italian boot into one giant maximum-security prison.

We walk down the hallway until we stop outside a door without a number. That usually means that it’s a suite. The man knocks discreetly and then enters without waiting for an answer. He ushers me in and immediately closes the door, remaining outside, silent and discreet as ever.

My father is standing in the middle of the room.

He’s tall, erect, and solid. I’m looking at what might very well be my own portrait when I reach his age. His dark eyes gaze at me without curiosity, the same curiosity that I fail to feel about him. I ought to be experiencing emotions, a flood of memories, fragments surfacing from the past. I ought to extend my hand to him, or spit in the hand that he extends to me, if he happened to extend his hand. But I feel absolutely nothing. I’ve seen too much blood spilled in the last few days to have any desire to see more. This isn’t a meeting between a father and a son. It’s just a chance encounter between two people who were bound to run into each other sooner or later.

We’re separated by only a few yards, but it’s an unbridgeable gulf.

His tone of voice is the same as ever. He doesn’t ask. He demands to be told.

“Where have you been?”

“Are you trying to tell me that you care?”

I’ve recovered my Sicilian accent and I address him with the old-fashioned formal that uses the
voi
, just as he so often told me he used to do when speaking to his father. He has no reaction. He steps closer to me. Now he’s only inches away. The slap arrives without warning and it covers the whole side of my face. But I’m not a little boy anymore and I feel no pain.

I straighten my head and at last I smile.

“It’s quite easy to hide from someone who isn’t looking for you.”

Senator Amedeo Sangiorgi maintains his composure. His attitude remains unchanged. His tone remains entirely unruffled. He still demands information.

“Why did you leave?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“Of whom?”

“Of everything and everyone. But especially of you.”

He listens to my words without seeming to take it too hard. As if it were just another of the gratuitous attacks leveled on the floor of the Italian parliament by a member of the opposition. He walks over to a small round table where a bottle of mineral water stands in an ice bucket. He pours himself a glass of water. He drinks it and then carefully sets the chalice back down on the table, as if he weren’t too sure of its structural integrity.

“That begs the next logical question. Why have you come back?”

“I’ve come back to tell you about chaos and chance.”

When he lifts his gaze to meet mine, there’s a question mark in his eyes. But that doesn’t yet rise to the level of curiosity. He’s just wondering whether his son has perhaps lost his mind. He walks over and sits down in the middle of a crimson velvet sofa. He extends both arms and rests them on the back of the sofa.

I continue. It’s my turn now. Now I’m the one who’s demanding information.

“I’ve come back to tell you about the way that those two factors took Nicola Sangiorgi by the hand and transformed him into another person.”

I walk around the room. I happen to notice a painting hanging on the wall, a fairly good imitation of Utrillo’s
Moulin de la Galette
.

I can feel his eyes boring into the back of my neck.

“A short while after I left, I was holed up in a cheap pensione in Rome. I met a poor devil, a man who worked in the office of vital records in a small town in the province of Perugia. His wife had cancer, and he’d spent every penny of his savings on her treatments. The two of us were born to get along. He needed money, I needed a name. So I found money for him and he found a name for me.”