The Goodbye Kiss (5 page)

    I
looked at the gorillas. First they'd beat me to death, then get the shovels
from the trunk of the car.

    "All
right, I'll straighten up," I promised, relieved the owner was in the dark
about my blackmail of the shoe dealer. Otherwise I would've had to pay for it
with the other arm. And kiss goodbye to Flora and the ten grand I still
expected to pocket sooner or later.

    The
next night the dancers started to get uppity, giving me wise-ass looks, snickering
behind my back. To restore order I had to make a scene in the dressing rooms
and throw some jars of face cream against the wall.

    I
went back to earning a hundred a day, and the prospect of going broke again
drove me to sharpen my wits. Despite my fixation on Flora. The broad loathed
me. On no account would she ever willingly go to bed with me. And this is
exactly what made the thing such a kick. I forced myself not to think about her
while I was working, and very soon I began to solve my financial problems. The
owner of a workshop that produced fake Florentine lace asked me for a hand to
sneak a group of Bulgarian embroiderers into Italy. It was a snap, and I got
paid handsomely. The word spread. A couple stockjobbers had contracts to sew
jeans for a name brand advertised on TV, and they needed some Chinese labor. It
was a matter of driving a van from Milano to Treviso; the envelope I made them
give me in advance contained a wad of two hundred euro notes. The owner of a
fishery had me poison a competitor's tanks. When I emptied the cans, the water
started to bubble, and the surface was covered with stiff trout. I always did
everything calmly, was never afraid. All I thought about was the money.

    Blue
Skies was of course patronized by hoods. Italian and foreign. But I never had
anything to do with that element and always confined myself to polite but
formal relations. All the same, I kept an eye on them and soon noticed how well
honest and criminal customers mixed together. The police had the club under
surveillance, but they too got a slice of the pie. The Barese's philosophy was
based on payoffs and informers.

    I
often helped with wrapping up deals. Particularly in the insurance line: fires
in warehouses, thefts of tractor-trailers, stolen goods. Crimes or incidents of
damage to non-existent merchandise. Made my first real money by ruining a
family man who loved the dancers but was unlucky enough to be living on a tax
inspector's salary. The first time he showed up with a couple of local manufacturers.
I'd already been tipped off so I arranged a series of private sessions with the
prettiest girls. Right away it was obvious the dude went for a Dominican chick,
tall and slender. I organized a private performance for him. Told the girl to
give him some mouth action, and his two friends would pay her well. He quickly
became a regular at the club. In the beginning he spent only what he could
afford, and I worked overtime to convince him I could give credit at zero
interest. "It's like buying a car on time," I told him with a smile.
He finally gave in, and when the account got to be too big for his means, the
two manufacturers sketched a plan that would take care of the debt by obliging
him to close both eyes to their bookkeeping practices. Like Flora's husband, he
let himself be fucked over. While I worked at Blue Skies, I saw so many like
them. And yet the game was played with the cards on the table. Setting aside
the ingenues and the idiots, I always thought these people couldn't wait to
debase themselves. The scams with the dancers and the coke represented no more
than opportunities to take the leap and enjoy life.

    The
club was a world apart that existed only by night and vanished by day. In time
I started to fear it. If I kept working there, I'd be trapped forever. I'd
confuse reality with the lie created by the dim lights and the dancers' heavily
made-up faces. When I counted my little nest egg and saw it amounted to a cool
thirty thousand, I thought the time had come to shift gears. But leaving the
Barese wasn't easy. You couldn't just announce you quit. In his fucked way of
thinking, so typical of a hood from southern Italy, that decision belonged to
him alone, and for the time being I was still useful to him. While I was
waiting for the right moment to end my contract with Blue Skies, the Romanians
called on me one night. They needed to teach a lesson to four Albanians who
bothered a few dancers in town. I tried to convince them not to get me involved
in any punitive expedition, but I realized if I insisted too much, those two
animals would've pounded me like a drum. We got into a stolen car. One of them
handed me a pickaxe. The Albanians lived out in the country in an isolated
house among frost-covered vines and soybean fields. The gorillas' plan was
simple.

    Smash
open the door, raise hell on the way in and whack them right and left. For me
fate reserved the only Albanian armed with a knife. I tried to bash in his
head, but he avoided the blow, which caught him on the right knee. The pain
made him pass out. One of the Romanians screamed at me to hit him in the face.
I struck him three times in a rage. At home I had to throw out my blood-stained
trousers. The incident got a short notice in the local newspapers. One of them
died from a crushed skull. Maybe the guy I hit. Maybe not. The Albanians were
scumbags; at the bar in town people celebrated with a round of prosecco.

    One
night after work I spotted Flora waiting for me outside my house, sitting in
her car. I walked over, smiling. We didn't meet that day, and for a moment I
kidded myself she really wanted to be with me. Instead she rolled down her
window. She smiled at me like she never did before. Her black-gloved hand gave
me an envelope.

    "Here's
the ten thousand. Count it if you want. We can finally say goodbye," she
told me, satisfied.

    I
felt numb. I didn't want to give up this woman, the power I exerted over her
body. "Flora-"

    "Flora
shit," she cut me off in a fit of anger. "Now get out of my
life."

    She
started the engine and disappeared into the night. I knew I'd lost her forever.
If I made a big deal about it, she'd go and complain to the Barese, and I'd
wind up in deep shit. I went inside the house. With a knife I removed the
bricks under the sink and added the money to my stash. Forty thousand. Now that
was saying something.

    The
next day I took a stroll through the centro. When I passed by Flora's store, I
didn't even glance in the window. I was again in pursuit of a lover, and I
covered the area methodically, patiently. But nowhere did I find a woman as
beautiful and sensual as her.

    That
night, after a slow, uneventful day, I left the place a little early. I went to
a club in Jesolo where I heard a forty-some- thing English entraineuse was
working. She was a letdown. Thin as a rail, flat chest. She had her clientele,
but she wasn't my type. I bought her a drink. Forced myself to listen to some
bullshit stories, then went home. Every once in a while the desire to see Flora
came over me, but fear stopped me in my tracks. Only that. Otherwise I would've
done something stupid just to be with her again.

    I had
a thing with the widow of a Milanese crime boss. After her husband died,
murdered in a maximum-security prison, she lost power and money. She was now
making do by working hotels. She played the role of the grande dame, refined,
classy, specializing in bald traveling businessmen in their fifties with
paunches and swollen wallets. It was me who hooked up with her, after watching
her fail to snare the owner of a Val d'Aosta cheese factory. I suggested we
have a drink.

    "Don't
I seem a little too mature to you?" she asked, surprised.

    I
looked her over. She must've been a very beautiful woman once. Now she was
fifty, fighting against time and wrinkles so she wouldn't end up streetwalking
at twenty euros a pop.

    "Do
you want to have a drink or go back to the cheesemaker? " I cut her short.

    She
was experienced but simpatica. She jabbered away, steering neatly between
topics to avoid seeming like a gossip or a noseybody. With a few well-aimed
questions I gathered she was going through a rough patch. That was exactly what
I hoped to learn. I got off on the idea of how low she might sink for some real
money, how much she'd humiliate herself. While she was telling me a couple
stories about a trip to Vienna, I interrupted her. I leaned close to her ear
and mentioned a figure. Then I asked if she felt like doing something for me.
She pretended to be scandalized, but from the expression on her face I knew her
response would be positive. I toyed with her dignity for a couple months. More
than once she took the money in tears. One night she asked me how I could be so
disgusting. At that point she left. Better that way. I was fed up too, and the
whole business was costing me a lot of money. But her question set me thinking.
She was right, I was disgusting, or to be more exact I was a bad egg, like the
priest said. It caused me no shame. I was aware of it, but the fact is,
wielding power over weak women helped me get by. Feel better. Survive. Deal
with my past, the Barese's abuses, all the shit at the club. Finally it was a
question of exchange value. Everything balanced out. Once upon a time I wasn't
like this, but things I went through transformed my life. I changed. I felt
like something inside me had snapped. Maybe some asshole psychoanalyst would've
said prison had destroyed my sense of balance. The relation between the guards
and convicts really wasn't so different from what I set up with Flora or the
widow. Maybe it happened before, in Paris or the Central American jungle. But I
didn't want to think about it too much. For me, San Vittore was a jumbled-up
heap of fragmented sights, noises and smells. If I concentrated, I could
probably put my memories back into some rational order. But I was afraid of
going to pieces. Too little time had gone by. I could find some meaning in life
and imagine a future only by constantly testing myself with extreme
experiences. I liked being a bad egg. And I finally had a chance to become a
winner.

    Summer
came. The work at the club was getting heavier, and I still hadn't found a way
to cut myself loose without getting on the Barese's wrong side. One day the
barman told me some guy was asking for me. I recognized him from behind. I'd
seen him too many times walking down the corridor of block six, pushing the
laundry cart. His name was Francesco Casu, alias Ciccio Formaggio:
"Casu" in Sardinian means "formaggio"
—
cheese. But you'd only find him in Sardegna during the
summer, visiting his grandparents. He hailed from Milano, where he was born.
He'd also been mind-fucked by some militant and pulled off his silly stunts
till they arrested him, giving him the chance to turn state's evidence. I
didn't care much for the guy, thought him a loser. As I walked over to him, I
hoped he hadn't come all this way to ask me for a job.

    I got
it wrong. He'd come to offer me a job. A robbery. The take: half a million
euros. At least.

    I
looked him right in the eye. "Why me?"

    He opened
his arms. "Because I'm just the tip-off and don't know shit about how to
organize a heist. You came to mind because of your experience with the Central
American guerrillas. You can plan a military operation."

    "How
d'you learn about the job?"

    "A
security guard."

    "They're
the first to sing."

    He
lowered his voice. "I've thought about leaving him out when we split the
cash. One more cut for the rest of us."

    "Who
else is in on it?"

    "Apart
from you, nobody."

    "The
target?"

    "An
armored truck in Varese. Every Saturday night, as punctual as a Swiss train, it
comes to collect the week's receipts from a superstore. Two guards get out,
open the night safe, pull out the bags and leave."

    "The
bit about the half a million… does it hold water?"

    "Hell
yes. I said
at least
half a million. According to the inside guy, it's
never less than three quarters."

    I
drained my gin fizz, mulling over the proposition. The amount was worth the
risk of going back to jail, especially if it didn't have to be split up too
many ways. The guard would be the first to die, then Ciccio Formaggio. He was
much too stupid to live with a secret that implicated me. I'd tie up any loose
ends later.

    "Before
I decide, I want to see the place and the pick-up."

    "Don't
worry. I'll arrange it."

    The
following Saturday I was in the parking lot of a huge superstore, pushing a
cart stuffed with things I'd just bought. I was acting like I forgot the row where
my car was parked while I eyeballed the steel box that held the money. Encased
in the exterior wall. According to Ciccio Formaggio's information, it had to be
collected within a few minutes.