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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2009 by Edizioni E/O

  Translation copyright © 2010 by Europa Editions

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo © Corbis

  ISBN 978-1-933372-80-8 (TPO)

  ISBN 978-1-60945-023-6 (ePub US & CA)

  ISBN 978-1-60945-025-0 (ePub World)

  Massimo Carlotto

  BANDIT LOVE

  Translated from the Italian

  by Antony Shugaar

  To the Minister of the Interior, to the Minister of Justice . . . On March 17th of this year, at the Institute of Legal Medicine of the University of Padua, there was a burglary resulting in the theft of a substantial quantity of illegal narcotics [ . . . ] the narcotics were being held in the laboratories for toxicological testing of the active principles. The narcotics in question comprised a total weight of approximately forty-four (44) kilograms, subdivided into thirty (30) kilograms of heroin, ten (10) kilograms of cocaine, and the rest in smaller lots of amphetamines, pills and other substances [ . . . ].

  These illegal substances were located in the storerooms of the laboratory of the Institute; access to those storerooms was blocked by an armored door; only those in possession of a magnetic card and accompanying alphanumeric code could enter without triggering the electronic security alarm.

  According to media reports, the theft was carried out without any evidence of damage to the locks of the armored doors and by deactivation of the alarm system . . .

  Written response to parliamentary inquiry 4-10236

  —session no. 476,

  Monday, June 14, 2004

  Tuesday, October 31, 2006

  The foreigner walked past the plate-glass window of the expensive beauty parlor for the third time. The woman had her back to the mirror. She was selecting a nail polish, nodding distractedly as the manicurist made her recommendations and a hairdresser, aged about fifty, combed her hair with confident precision.

  The foreigner walked on, figuring that it wouldn’t be much longer before the woman left the shop. He’d been following her for exactly one week now and he sensed that the time was right. He straightened the lapel of his long dark overcoat and stopped in front of another shop window to look at a few antiques, especially a late eighteenth-century table of Venetian manufacture.

  The proprietor of the shop was adjusting a painting of an elderly noblewoman. He smiled at the foreigner, encouraging him to enter the shop. The foreigner lowered his head, in an apparently natural way, not as if he were trying to escape notice, and pretended to be deeply interested in a lamp standing on a side table. Then he turned and moved away.

  He wasn’t worried in the slightest. There hadn’t been time for his features to impress themselves in the antiques dealer’s mind, and experience had taught him that eyewitnesses are seldom reliable. But above all, his tranquility stemmed from the fact that he was a perfect stranger in a neighborhood that in no more than an hour he would leave, never to return.

  He walked on down the porticoed walkway, shooting glances into the fashionable shopfronts, trying to guess where else the woman might make a stop before deciding to return home. She lived in a nearby town, and the foreigner understood perfectly why she had to drive from her town to this one just to have her hair done. The town where she lived was on the water. There was no one there but fishermen and their families; in late October the tourists stopped coming, most of the shops and restaurants closed for the winter, and those few shops that kept their shutters raised were certainly unworthy of the discerning tastes of such an elegant woman.

  It was a workday, midafternoon, winter shadows, only the occasional pedestrian . . . The foreigner evaluated the operating conditions once again; as he did, he knocked softly on the side of a white panel van. Before getting in, he stopped to take a quick glance at the small expensive car parked right next to it.

  “I don’t think we’ll have much longer to wait,” he told the two men seated on the boxes that cluttered the van’s cargo deck.

  Neither man moved a muscle or made the slightest sound. They were professionals; they had no use for theories or possibilities. They’d been ready for a while now, and they’d be ready until the job was done. The foreigner knew them well; they were his most trusted accomplices. Years ago, in the army, they’d had ranks and uniforms, but now they were just a pair of faithful heavies, his enforcers and, when needed, capable killers.

  The glare of a nearby streetlight filtered through the heavy paper covering the windows of the rear cargo doors. The foreigner glanced at the hands of his two lieutenants; they were gloved in latex: in that dim light they had taken on a spectral hue. The gloves on his own hands were made of a fine, thin leather. None of the three men wanted to leave fingerprints behind; and they wouldn’t. The panel van would drive for a long way until it reached safe haven, but they would set fire to it anyway, to keep even the finest scrap of fiber or drop of biological evidence from falling into the hands of a prying detective.

  The foreigner knew that he was being far too careful, but he had too little information about the motives and interests that had summoned him to that town in Northeast Italy to let down his guard. He had been contacted and paid a very substantial sum of money to take care of that woman. A contract like any other. Simple and straightforward: but he had survived a civil war, and as far as he was concerned he was still alive because he’d always been careful about details.

  He heaved a sigh and got comfortable.

  The woman continued to chat with the manicurist as she walked to the cash register. The hairdresser took just one more lingering look at her ass. Not only was it a nice ass, the woman knew how to make it undulate and sway. The hairdresser’s appraising stare did not escape his wife, who was blow-drying another customer’s hair. Without missing a beat, she savored the vicious comment she planned to hiss at him the minute the woman was out the door. “That black bitch is nothing but a whore,” would be the first words out of her mouth. They were vicious words; they were also substantially inaccurate. The woman’s skin was amber and her eyes were blue, the sort of combination you’d expect to find when an Arab woman from Sétif, Algeria, decides to have a baby with a Breton from St.-Malo, France. She was just under 5’ 8”, but her high-heeled boots made her look taller; her body was firm and supple, and her movements were sensual and lithe, the movements of the belly dancer that she was. She had been performing professionally for over a quarter century, in nightclubs all over Europe: that was why the hairdresser’s wife was eagerly waiting to call her a slut. The fact is that most of the men around there liked the woman’s looks, even the younger men, who would have gladly slipped into bed with that exotic forty-six-year-old dancer from another country.

  As she waited for the credit card receipt to print out, the woman took a look at herself in the mirror, turning her head ever so slightly so that her long raven hair bounced, shimmering with auburn highlights. She crossed the street and stepped into a coffee shop. She ordered her usual blend and savored the little cup of espresso, leaving a perfect lipstick kiss on the rim of the demitasse. She conversed briefly with the proprietor, an habitué of the nightclub where she worked. He showed her a brochure advertising a bellydancing class, and suggested she ask about teaching. She said nothing in response. Out of her past, the face of her only teacher surfaced, an Egyptian Ghaziya who never tired of reminding her that all belly dancers were gypsies to begin with, and gypsies they would a
lways remain. She’d never forgotten and she’d never stopped wandering—until the day she found love. He was a tall strong man, with laughing eyes, surrounded by deep creases. She had left him for a year; then she’d returned to him. She had no illusions, but she was determined to stay by his side until the day she understood it was well and truly over.

  A little further along the row of storefronts, she noticed a pair of shoes and made a mental note to come back some other time. Now she had to hurry home. On her day off, the evening and the night were consecrated to her lover.

  A few steps short of her car she slipped her hand into her purse, rummaging for the remote. She heard a rustle behind her and out of the corner of her eye she saw the side door of a panel van slide open. Strong arms seized her and dragged her into the windowless van. For a split second her eyes darted around in the dark, desperately searching for the only person who could save her. But her love wasn’t there. She wondered if she’d ever see him again.

  With violent efficiency she was immobilized, gagged, and blindfolded. She’d spent enough time in nightclubs and she’d seen enough of the scum of the earth that tended to congregate in them to understand that they had no intention of killing her. Not right now, anyway.

  She felt a sharp sting at the side of her neck. After a few seconds, a merciful lethargy coated the fear, numbing her.

  The foreigner took a large gold ring out of his pocket and fastened it to the woman’s keychain. Then he stepped out of the panel van, opened the door of the smaller car, and slid the keychain and ring under the front seat. To him the act was meaningless. It was a request of his client, who had paid a handsome bonus for that bizarre grace note.

  He got behind the wheel of the panel van and started the engine.

  A few hours later, when the town was already slumbering and the streets were deserted, a man opened the door of the woman’s car. He ran a hand over the dashboard and peered between the seats in search of a clue, any evidence at all, that might tell him where she had gone. He’d waited for her to come home until there was no conceivable explanation for her absence, and then he set out to find her. When he found the ring under the seat his heart began racing, thumping. He suppressed an urge to roar in fury. It took him long minutes of effort to calm himself down; he sniffed the air inside the car. He could just barely detect the unmistakable scent of the perfume that the woman ordered from a small producer in Florence. Bad sign. It meant that whoever had taken her had several hours’ head start.

  * * *

  That evening, I was in a bar in the center of Padua. It was one of those bars that serve spritz by the quart, with all the customers outside, plastic glasses in one hand and cigarettes in the other. The smoking ban, aside from making bars and nightclubs a little less festive and customers and waiters a little healthier, had also led to an invasion of the piazzas and sidewalks. In the city of Padua, more than a few citizens felt that this new fashion deserved public debate, motions and adjournments in the city council meetings, and rivers of ink in the pages of the local press. Even though the great recession was still looming on the horizon, the signs were clear that the country was going to the dogs. Wasting time and energy on pointless issues had already become a national sport.

  The woman I’d arranged to meet rushed in. She was afraid she was late; she was, in fact, late—by a good ten minutes. Since she’d never met me, she had no idea how elastic I was when it came to punctuality. She looked around wildly, trying to figure out which of the people at the bar could be me. I waved a hand to help out.

  “Are you Marco Buratti?” she asked, hesitantly.

  I nodded. “Care for a drink?”

  She shook her head. I shrugged and sipped my spritz. Prosecco, Campari, seltzer, a splash of Cynar, an orange slice, ice. That’s how I drank it. There were countless variations, and by now even the Chinese knew them all—the Chinese had been buying up bars in Padua for years now.

  I gave her a chance to give me the once-over while I lit a cigarette.

  “All things considered, you look pretty sinister,” was the opinion she came to. “Maybe I made a mistake when I agreed to meet you.”

  I smiled at her—it was a way of warning her not to act too snooty. I pointed at the cowboy boots sticking out of the legs of my blue jeans and ran my hand over my beat-up leather jacket. “You don’t like my style?” I asked.

  She tried a weak counterattack. “All the other private investigators have big half-page ads in the yellow pages and . . . you’re not even listed.”

  “Well, as far as that goes, I don’t even have a license.”

  She gasped in amazement, and her mouth remained open. “So you’re going to try to blackmail me?”

  I was done being patient. “What I’m trying to do is save your ass, gorgeous,” I hissed at her in a brutal whisper. “Like I told you on the phone, your husband’s lawyer hired me; your husband suspects that you’re sleeping with his business partner.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, her voice rising to somewhere just short of a shriek.

  “And I know that. In fact, you’ve been screwing a civil engineer you met at the gym.”

  “Have you told my husband?”

  “No.”

  She let out the deepest sigh of relief of her thirty-nine years of life. “Are you going to?”

  I pretended to give a solemn air to the occasion by lifting my glass to my lips. In fact, I had no intention of ratting her out.

  There was a time when I would have. The client was sacred, but then one day it dawned on me that the universe of suspicious spouses deserves only to have its wallets emptied and that, all things considered, cheating on your husband or wife is just one of the many ways of making it through the day, or night. What really pounded the concept into my head was a blonde from Mestre, just outside Venice, who caught me following her one day. Her arguments and her tone were highly persuasive. “At work, my boss busts my chops, my daughter’s going to have to wear her braces for another two years, and my husband is a regular guy, but I might have been a little overhasty when I decided he was the man of my dreams,” she said practically without a pause. “So I step out on him occasionally; nothing serious, just a bout of pure sex, and then I feel better. Can you understand that?” I nodded and then shared a couple of tricks with her to keep the man to whom she’d sworn eternal fidelity from getting too suspicious.

  I tossed my plastic glass into a trashcan. “Sometimes, people are just in a hurry to get caught so they can send their marriage to hell in a handbasket and start a new life. If that’s what you’re looking for, I can hand over a couple of photographs to the lawyer,” I explained to the woman sitting across from me, acting as if I was an expert on couples and relationships, though anyone can tell you (and on more than one occasion they’ve told me) that I don’t understand fuck all about women—and my friends tell me so, to my face, from time to time.

  “But if you’re interested in holding your marriage together, then be a little more careful, and don’t rely on technology. Text messages, emails . . . it’s all stuff that was invented to make sure people leave tracks, to make it easier to keep an eye on them.”

  “I don’t want to leave my husband,” she mumbled, practically in tears.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called the lawyer who had hired me. “The woman’s on the level,” I told him. “The business partner is sleeping with the Irish au pair who takes care of his kids. He likes them young.”

  “Thank you . . .” she added, working herself into an emotional state.

  I stood up, shook her hand, wished her good luck, and left, drifting out into the crowd swilling aperitifs. I strode across a piazza and slipped into a narrow lane in the old Jewish ghetto. I stopped off at Alberto all’Anfora and downed a glass of bubbly prosecco. I listened to people talking about the latest rugby match, and then I went home.

  Back in those days, I owned a bar myself. I had a partner, a fat man named Max, also known as Max la Memoria—Max the Memory.
The bar was just outside of Padua, and it occupied the ground floor of an old farmhouse that, miraculously, no one had demolished to make room for another of the countless industrial sheds that blighted the landscape. My customers called it La Cuccia—the Dog’s Bed—because it was comfortable and welcoming, you could listen to good music, and the shelves behind the bar were crowded with bottles of good liquor.

  From the day the bar opened, it was run by Rudy Scanferla, a bartender I’d known practically all my life. He knew his job, he worked hard in exchange for a good salary—and he never forgot to give himself cost-of-living salary hikes, indexed to inflation.

  Scrawled across a mirror in red were a couple of verses of I Drink, a song by the blues goddess Mary Gauthier.

  Fish swim

  Birds fly

  Daddies yell

  Mamas cry

  Old men

  Sit and think

  I DRINK

  This represented the institutional philosophy of the bar, and my clientele respected it to the letter. You could smoke at La Cuccia. We’d spent a little money on a decent HVAC system, but we weren’t up to code, so every month we handed out rustling bundles of cash to the various city inspectors. Nowadays there is just no way to be fully in compliance; the only way to stay in business was to hand out a few under-the-counter payments. On the other side of the transaction, people were lining up to be inspectors and enforcers of regulations: it wasn’t quite as profitable as going into politics, but it did guarantee a comfortable income.

  I had to admit that the inspectors weren’t putting the screws to us too bad; our place wasn’t the kind of bar that took in a lot of cash. It was a nightspot for liquor-drinkers who like to listen to good jazz and blues, so it was hardly fashionable.