He was going to kill her; she was sure of it. Yet
she still couldn't quite imagine how. He was in no hurry,
and meted out pain with slow, studied movements. Using
a system of pulleys, he kept altering her position and
with each new move the power of his playful imagination
astounded her.
He removed her blindfold and ordered her to look at the
object he was holding in his hand, saying he had created
it specially for her. She obeyed, and in that instant
realized she was about to die. Terror took possession
of her mind, but only for a moment. He penetrated her
gently and made her climax one more time.
While her body was shaking with pleasure, something enormous
and implacable began to make its slow way through her
intestines. She attempted to wriggle free but managed
only to arch her back. She wished she could die at once
but he wasn't letting her. He was good. He was the best
she had ever met.
The cellphone in my shirt pocket vibrated. I continued
to stare for a while at the flickering green dot, while
I decided what to do. I had too much alcohol in my body
to think straight, so I answered it, just to get it off
my mind. The deafening music forced me out onto the street.
It was Rudy Scanferla, who worked at my club: he even
pretended he owned it. He said some guy had turned up
who was in a hurry to talk to me. I replied I would be
back the next day and clicked off. It was probably a client,
but right then I was in no mood to listen to other people's
troubles. I was having a better time than I'd had for
years.
I was in the small Tuscan town of Pontedera, at Music
Asylum, a store that sold CDs, vinyl and books, and belonged
to a friend of mine, Guido Genovesi. We were celebrating,
albeit rather belatedly, the birth of his daughter. The
fact is I didn't pass that way very often. Four years
earlier, I had walked into Music Asylum to buy a Canned
Heat record and had found Guido there chatting and sipping
aperitifs with a friend of his, Giacomo Minuti. We had
taken a good look at one another and that was it: we were
friends. After the shop closed we had gone on drinking
and chatting in one bar after another, and when the very
last landlord had shown us the door, we had climbed into
Giacomo's car and had driven to the Piaggio village to
watch the sun rise. It was a tight little district, built
for the workers and employees of the famous scooter manufacturer
which, for better or worse, had transformed the lives
of just about everyone in the area. Giacomo had grown
up there and reckoned that if you wanted to understand
anything about Pontedera, here was the place to start.
He was right.
I dropped in on Guido and Giacomo whenever I was within
striking distance. Apart from running Music Asylum, Guido
liked to write short stories. Giacomo, on the other hand,
had a desk-job at the council offices in Vicopisano. One
afternoon he had taken me on a tour of the town's castle
and ancient jails. Prisoners there ground down the terracotta
tiles of their cell floors, mixed the powder with water
and used the resulting reddish paste to write and draw
on the walls. I had been struck by the sketch of a steamship
that an anarchist from Carrara, one Sirio Belletti, had
made, during Fascism. It had made me long to run far away.
Giacomo didn't know I had been in prison. He and Guido
had never asked me anything about my past, nor about how
I made a living. I would have been forced to spin them
some yarn about my present circumstances, but I would
have told them the truth about my past; that I had spent
seven years in prison, accused of terrorist offences.
I wouldn't have wasted time explaining I was innocent.
A pointless detail in the overall scheme of things. The
night I blew my youth away, all I had done was let a guy
I didn't know sleep at my flat. Then the cops had turned
up, hooded and armed to the teeth. I had never seen the
guy again – he was still in prison with a couple
of life sentences to serve. I could have beaten the rap,
but the judge insisted I recognize some persons I had
never seen in my life before and who had done me no harm.
I was an ex-student and former blues singer, and prison
had been hard on me. It had dried up my voice and fed
a certain obsession with the truth. The kind that the
blindfolded goddess of Justice never gets to see. On my
release, I had exploited my reputation as someone who
could keep his mouth shut and had used the experience
I had gained in prison acting as a peacemaker between
the various factions of the criminal underworld to carve
myself out a profession as an unlicensed detective.
It had turned out to be a smart move. Lawyers who needed
an entrée into the criminal underworld to get their
clients out of trouble were more than happy to come to
me for help. My services didn't come cheap, but I almost
always managed to stick my nose in the kind of places
that investigating magistrates, cops and even ex-cop private
investigators couldn't even think of approaching.
Business was brisk. I had bought myself a club just outside
Padova. It was open only at night, was a good place to
drink and the music was first-rate. Customers referred
to it affectionately as La Cuccia, the dog basket. I had
bought it because I needed a place where I could receive
clients – a table kept permanently reserved in a
strategic position from which I could keep an eye on the
door, the bar and the stage. On account of my past, I
had had to register La Cuccia in the name of Rudy Scanferla,
my barman. He had been happy to accept the arrangement,
enjoyed boasting about his club to the ladies, and the
wages I paid him weren't bad either.
For my investigative work, I had two associates: Beniamino
Rossini and Max the Memory. Rossini was a gangster of
the old school. His father was from Milan but his mother
was a legendary smuggler from the Basque country and it
was her footsteps he had first chosen to follow, only
later switching to holding up security vans. After a long
interval spent in Italy's prisons, he had returned to
cross-border trafficking, specializing in the Dalmatian
coast, which he reached by high-speed motorboat. Lately
he had been involved in recovering moneys hidden in the
most improbable places, on behalf of prisoners unlikely
to be released until well after the introduction of the
euro, which was scheduled for 1 January 2002. Beniamino
would go and pick up the proceeds from robberies and a
variety of other illegal activities – on the strict
understanding that neither narcotics nor child pornography
had been involved – and would then pass the
cash on to the right people to put it back into circulation,
so that it could be converted into the new currency. Rossini
hung on to twenty per cent of the sums recovered and naturally
didn't have to issue receipts. His name, in any case,
was as good as any guarantee.
He was rich enough not to need to take any part in my
investigations, but the fact is that when we were in prison
together I saved his life, and ever since he had made
quite sure no harm ever came my way. Besides, he relished
any kind of adventure. It made him feel alive. He had
been married, but while he was residing at the state's
pleasure his wife had betrayed him with his lawyer, abandoning
him without a lira. He had taken no revenge and, frankly,
I had never understood why.
On his left wrist, Rossini wore a collection of gold bracelets:
one for every man he had killed. When it came to violence,
he was a true professional, using it to administer justice
in accordance with the dictates of a gangland code now
quite forgotten by the younger generation. Even though
he was over sixty, he remained a redoubtable enemy. Tall,
slim, still muscular, elegant, with dyed but thinning
hair and a Xavier Cugat moustache, Beniamino loved nightclubs
and the women who frequented them. For the last few years,
he had been seeing Sylvie, a French-Algerian bellydancer.
It was a relationship typical of the nightclub world –
lived from day to day, without any plans for the long
term.
My other associate, Max the Memory, had gained his nickname
on account of his passion for filing away all kinds of
useful information. He had been accused of murder and
of membership of an armed gang and had been on the wanted
list for years, though in fact he had never left Padova.
I had got to know him during one of my investigations,
when I had needed information on some major operators
who wanted me dead. At that time, Max was using his woman,
Marielita, a South-American street artist, to do his spying
in the city so he could keep his files updated. One day
she was murdered by killers working for the locally based
Brenta Mafia, and I was the one who held her in my arms
as blood gushed from her belly and mouth. Max had never
recovered from that loss and I, for my part, had never
got over my sense of guilt, because Marielita and I had
once spent a night together. It should never have happened.
Anyway, Max couldn't lie low for ever. They were bound
to catch up with him sooner or later; they always did.
Rossini and I managed to set up a trade with an anti-Mafia
judge. It was the classic approach to justice: first you
negotiate and then, when you've struck a deal, you go
through all the rigmarole of the trial. In the end, the
judge saw it was in his interest to help Max obtain a
pardon after a relatively brief stay in jail.
When Max walked out of the gates of Rome's Rebibbia prison,
I was there to give him a big hug and invite him to come
and live at my place, in an empty flat over the club.
He had accepted and from that day on we had been associates.
His years in hiding and the loss of Marielita had left
their mark. He spent a lot of time shut up in his study
in front of his computer, smoking, drinking beer and grappa,
and listening to good music. Prison had also bequeathed
him a particular way of cooking. It was a solitary ritual,
consisting of slow, measured motions that somehow enabled
him to exorcise time and lick his wounds. Having filled
the holes in his existence with food, tobacco and alcohol,
he was overweight and his fingers were yellow with nicotine.
I affectionately called him Fat Max, but never to his
face. Max was touchy.
At the end of an investigation that had brought us into
head-on conflict with a gang of Colombians, Max had decided
to return to political activism. He wasn't content any
more just to solve cases. Old Rossini and I had tried
to talk him out of it because if he got into any trouble
in the five years immediately following his release, his
pardon could be revoked. The way things stood, a conviction
for fly-posting could get him another fifteen years. He
swore he'd be careful.
He had joined the so-called movement of movements, becoming
what Italian newspapers refer to as a 'No Global'. He
got involved in the fair-trade business, working for a
Venice-based consortium of non-profit organizations that
imported goods and produce from Africa, Latin America
and Asia. There was nothing dangerous or illegal in this,
but he had to take care not to lower his guard. The political
climate in Italy had changed and anybody who thought that
another world was possible was increasingly viewed as
an enemy of Western democracy and civilization.
Whatever my misgivings, as a friend I had to feel happy
for him. His smile was less sad now and he had recovered
his interest in women. I had invited him to come with
me to Pontedera but he had had some meeting to go to.
He'd asked me to make a detour and drop in at his favourite
pasticceria near Florence, to buy him a supply of good-quality
chocolate. I was going to do that the following day, before
returning to Padova and meeting the new client –
assuming, that is, he would have the patience to wait
for me.
Guido clapped me on the shoulder. 'Time for supper,' he
said.
I smiled. I knew what my Tuscan friends meant by supper.
We wouldn't be getting up from the table till at least
two in the morning.
Translated from Italian by Christopher Woodall
The Master of Knots was published by Orion Books (London)
in December 2004.
October
2005 
