The dogs of Rome cab-1 Page 31

  “Where is it?” Massoni had asked without even turning round, as Pernazzo staggered in behind him.

  “I haven’t got it. You said to have it for this afternoon. It’s still morning.”

  “If you don’t have it now, you won’t have it in the afternoon.”

  “Yes, I will. I was paid for a Web site. Bank transfer the other day. The money’s in the bank.”

  Massoni went over to the door leading into Pernazzo’s mother’s bedroom. As he reached it, he paused and turned around to look at Pernazzo.

  “What’s in there?”

  “My mother.”

  “And maybe the five thousand you owe Alleva? Five thousand eight as it now is.”

  “No, it’s not in there. She’s very old. She’s dying.”

  Massoni stepped back a little from the door.

  “She could have heard that,” he said.

  “She’s too doped to know, too much in pain to care.”

  Massoni leaned over and practically plucked Pernazzo from the ground. “We’re going to the bank together. I hope for your sake you were telling the truth.”

  Pernazzo had been telling the truth. He had been paid five thousand for a Web design, five thousand more for some JavaScript that wasn’t even very good, and a few hundred from another client for some style sheet templates.

  His bank balance was eleven thousand euros, of which he owed twenty-two hundred in VAT immediately, and around four thousand more in taxes, payable in a few months. After paying off his fifty-eight-hundred-euro gambling debt to Alleva, he would be unable to cover his tax bill. Unless his mother died first.

  Pernazzo came out of the bank that day with sixty-three hundred-euro notes. Massoni was waiting for him. He handed him fifty- eight notes. Massoni counted them three times. Pernazzo allowed him to walk away a bit, then called out. Massoni stopped, walked back over, fists clenched. As he reached him, Pernazzo deftly inserted five one-hundred bills into Massoni’s hand.

  “That’s for not going into my mother’s bedroom. I appreciate it.”

  Massoni looked at him, closed his fist around the money. He smiled contemptuously at Pernazzo.

  Pernazzo smiled back. Massoni could be bought. It took longer than he expected, and he had to pay Massoni off a few times, but eventually, Massoni told him the underdog trick, and together they laid out a plan for placing a large bet against Alleva. Massoni said he would get some other friends involved.

  After his bath, he sat by the phone and waited. After an hour and ten minutes, it rang.

  “Did you take the message?” said Massoni not wasting time with preliminaries.

  “I did,” said Pernazzo. He felt a catch in his throat, and wondered whether he was going to vomit again. But then he realized it was joy rising from his chest. He did not want to vomit: he wanted to sing, roar, laugh. Pernazzo hugged himself in glee.

  “Did he say anything?”

  Pernazzo thought back. Had Clemente said anything? He could only remember grunts and gasps and those wet sounds at the end.

  “No.”

  “Shit. If he brings journalists again we’ll have to cancel for months.”

  “I don’t think he’ll bring any journalists to the dog fight tomorrow,” said Pernazzo.

  “Did he say that?”

  “Not exactly. This is shit you can’t explain on the phone.”

  He left the phrase hanging there, but Massoni ignored it. “You got the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. I’ll be around in an hour.”

  Pernazzo sat waiting. Listening to the radio. There was no news of Clemente’s murder. He was scared of what Massoni might do if he found out, but he was dying to tell him, too.

  39

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 5 P.M.

  Massoni sat down on a wooden-slat chair near Pernazzo’s desk. The chair let out a sharp crack. Massoni stood up, looked at it, and sat down more slowly. The chair held its own. He put a plastic bag on the floor, and lifted out a gray Puma shoebox, about to give way at the sides.

  He slid the box across the floor toward Pernazzo, who had settled on the sofa. It hit something sticky on the floor, fell over and lost its lid. Inside, partly enveloped in a lint cloth, was a colorless Glock 22 that looked like it was fashioned from prison soap. Pernazzo bent down to retrieve it.

  Massoni did not move a muscle.

  Basically, Pernazzo was disappointed. The weapon did not look impressive. It did not even look real. He really did not want to part with fifteen bright green hundred-euro notes for this thing.

  He picked it up. It was even lighter than he had imagined. With a sudden sense of panic, he wondered if it might not be a fake, and Massoni was brimming with silent laughter right now, dying to tell his friends about selling a toy gun for one and a half grand. Casually, he checked it. It looked real enough. He had read that all you had to do with a Glock was pull the strange double trigger.

  “The money’s there, on the desk,” said Pernazzo. He watched as Massoni looked over, saw the envelope, and beside the envelope the magnificent knife. Now there was a real weapon. “Be back in a moment.”

  Pernazzo took his gun, went to the kitchen and examined it more carefully. It was real. He exerted tiny pressure on the safety catch and trigger mechanism, and felt it begin to travel back. That’s all it would take. Then he opened the refrigerator, came back in with two tumblers and a one-and-a-half-liter plastic bottle of Fanta, his favorite drink.

  “Want some?”

  “No,” said Massoni.

  Pernazzo twisted open the top, enjoyed the hiss and the gassy orange whiff, then poured himself a full glass. He put the glasses on the desk. The money was gone; the knife was in a different position.

  He drank down his glass, holding the Glock by his side, in a natural way. He put down his glass, picked up the plastic bottle and carried it over to the sofa, and crammed it into the corner so that half of it was protruding from below the velveteen brown cushion. He leaned over, placed the barrel of the pistol right against the plastic and, as he had read he was supposed to do, squeezed rather than pulled the trigger.

  The gun went click.

  “You didn’t like your Fanta?” said Massoni.

  Pernazzo kept his back turned. He could feel himself beginning to shake. He tried to modulate his voice, but the words came out vibrating with emotion. “The gun you sold me doesn’t even work!”

  “It’s not loaded,” said Massoni. “Look.”

  Pernazzo had to turn around now. He set a look of indifference on his face as he did so, but the grin on Massoni’s face almost made him lose it.

  Massoni was holding out both hands. In one was a magazine clip, in the other a red and gray box.

  “Bullets,” said Massoni. “Here.” His huge hand beckoned Pernazzo to give him back the pistol. Pernazzo thought about it, then surrendered the weapon.

  Massoni popped out the magazine, inserted the new one, shook the box. “These are forty-caliber cartridges.” He opened the box, plucked out snub-nosed bullets and began pressing them into the empty magazine with his fat thumb. “Like this. Easy, see?”

  “Just put them on the desk.”

  Massoni did as asked, and said, “You’ve got to tell me what that move with the Fanta was about.”

  “Give me back my gun first.”

  Massoni held out the weapon, and Pernazzo snatched it. He let it hang in the air for a few seconds, its square-shaped barrel pointing causally toward Massoni’s crotch, kneecaps.

  Eventually Massoni noticed, and said, “Careful.”

  Pernazzo went back to the sofa. The weapon in his hand felt better balanced.

  “Why do you want to shoot the bottle?” insisted Massoni.

  “I want to test it.”

  Massoni scraped his neck tattoo with his forefinger.

  “Test what?”

  “The Glock!”

  “Against the Fanta, it is going to win.”

  “The bottle is a silencer. You put the barrel up
against a full plastic bottle and fire, it muffles the sound.”

  Massoni pulled his head back in disbelief. “Who told you that?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You want to shoot that bottle on the sofa?”

  Pernazzo began to raise the weapon slightly so that it was aiming at Massoni’s barge-like shoe.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll cover the whole place in fizzy orange.”

  “That’s obvious,” said Pernazzo.

  “Yeah, but you’ll blow a hole in the sofa, too.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t get it. Those are forty-caliber cartridges. You’ll probably smash a hole in the wall or floor, too, and the noise would be just as loud.”

  “No, it won’t. The bottle will silence it.”

  “No way. Not a forty-caliber in a closed room. You ever used a pistol in an enclosed space?”

  Pernazzo looked at the large shape of Massoni, colorless against the bright window. His hand ached in sympathy with his imagination, which foresaw the Glock in his hand and himself standing in front of Massoni sprawled on the floor as he retrieved the money.

  Massoni shrugged, “Whatever you want to think. Tell me about Clemente. Did you tell him we were watching him, his wife, his kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t even believe you went to his house,” said Massoni. “He probably wasn’t even in. Or maybe you chickened out when he answered the door. It doesn’t matter. We’ll find a proper way of persuading him.”

  “I killed him,” said Pernazzo. “I got in and I killed the bastard. With that knife on the table, the one you just touched.”

  Massoni moved away from the window, and the sunlight struck Pernazzo between the eyes, disorienting him and giving a strobe-light effect to Massoni’s movements. One moment he was at the window, next moment he seemed to have got across the floor in a single jerking movement and was standing in front of Pernazzo. He balled Pernazzo’s shirt in his fist, drew their faces together, then relaxed and said, “No. You’re kidding. In your dreams you killed a man.”

  “That’s his bag there,” said Pernazzo pointing to a gray backpack near the desk.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Nothing. I used it for my clothes.”

  “No, you didn’t. This isn’t some fantasy game.”

  “I killed him. You’ll hear. It’ll be on TV and the radio.”

  “No way,” said Massoni. “I was just messing with your head sending you there. You think we need you as messenger boy?”

  “You couldn’t afford to go there yourself. It was too risky, so you sent me.”

  “If we wanted to harm the guy, we’d have sent a real person. Jesus, you’re serious? How did you get in?”

  “The building door downstairs was open, then I just knocked on his apartment door. He opened.”

  “And you-what-you burst in and stabbed him?”

  “A guy was delivering groceries. He had gone upstairs, left two boxes there. When the dog lover opened, he thought I was the grocery boy. Made it easier. Except I had to wait till I was sure the real grocery boy wasn’t going to knock on the door.”

  “He was on his own?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank Christ for small mercies. Do you know whose daughter he’s fucking? That’s why I couldn’t do it… Have you any idea what you’ve just done? What was so hard about dropping a few hints, like I said? I should-I should shoot you right now.”

  But Massoni made no move to extract a weapon. Maybe he was not armed. Pernazzo tightened his grip on his own.

  “I need to phone Alleva,” said Massoni. “This is unbelievable.”

  “So phone him. It’s about time you and he started taking me seriously.”

  Massoni pulled out a small folding cell phone, and stared at it doubt-fully. Pernazzo wondered how he managed to push fewer than ten buttons at a time with his sausage fingers.

  Massoni eventually made his call. “Yeah, I know, unbelievable,” Pernazzo heard him say. He used the word three times.

  When he had finished, he looked at Pernazzo and shook his head slowly from side to side-a gesture of admiring disbelief, Pernazzo felt.

  “Are we going to see Alleva?”

  “No. First, we check that this is true. You stay here. Don’t move from this house.”

  “What about our bet for tomorrow night-the underdog fight?”

  Massoni ran his hand through the hedgehog hair of his head. “You expect the dog fight to go ahead? After Clemente has been killed? The whole operation will close for months now.”

  “Shit, I hadn’t thought about that,” said Pernazzo.

  “Alleva’s going to hold you responsible for lost income. But that’s the least of your worries now.”

  “We can do the underdog bet some other time, then,” said Pernazzo.

  “Sure we can, Angelo. Sooner or later you’re going to be a big winner.”

  “And you. You get thirty percent.”

  “How could I forget?” said Massoni. “Stay in, remember? Answer the door to visitors. It’ll be me or maybe Alleva.”

  He left.

  Pernazzo spent the rest of the day monitoring the news. At eight, he took a scheduled twenty-minute nap and dreamed about his mother, as he did every night since the night he had helped her to die. He dreamed about Clemente, and he dreamed about the girl with the sleek hair running barefoot. He had met her in Second Life, or when he was in primary school. He couldn’t remember.

  When he woke up, his eyes would not open and his body would not move when he commanded it, not that he wanted to. He felt as if his body were made of heavy metal, and the bed was magnetic but soft. He wished he could stay immobile and relaxed like that forever.

  He thought he was awake because the radio was playing, but then he noticed it was talking about Clemente and Alleva, so he figured he must still be asleep. Then it was talking about the weather and a storm front making its way down south. Pernazzo sat up and realized he was back in real life.

  He left the radio on while he worked on a new style sheet for the Web site of the local government offices of Genzano. It was pathetic. He knew Perl, and could make the deadest Web site interactive in a few days, but no one cared about quality. They would pay him two hundred euros. The plaque on the door had cost him a hundred fifty. It was meant to be an in-joke for a planned real-life meeting at his place with two Blood Elves, but they never showed up. Both made pathetic excuses that night when he met them online.

  The radio did not mention Clemente again, so it must have been a dream.

  Friday had become Saturday, and Saturday had unfolded hour by tedious hour and done nothing to celebrate Pernazzo’s new status. Meanwhile Pernazzo’s Uberman sleep schedule was going to hell. It was the tension of waiting and hearing nothing. Finally, at five in the evening, the radio reported on the killing of Clemente, husband of a respected Green Party MP. He hadn’t known that bit about the wife and was pleased. It enhanced the prestige.

  At half past seven, the intercom buzzed and he went to answer it.

  “Pernazzo?” said the voice.

  It wasn’t Massoni. He did not recognize the voice. “Yes?”

  “Angelo Pernazzo?”

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  And then the voice said, “Police.”

  40

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 8:50 P.M.

  Angelo Pernazzo felt slippage in his stomach when the voice pronounced the word “police.” He ran to the table in the living room, where he had set down the Glock, picked it up, then ran back. But if there was more than one of them, it would be pointless trying to shoot his way out. The intercom button buzzed again, loud and long. The effect was to turn his fear into anger.

  “I’m still here, fuck it,” he told the impatient cop.

  “Did you hear me? I said police.”

  “OK,” said Pernazzo. He buzzed open the door, an
d went into his bedroom and slipped the Glock and the Ka-Bar under the mattress.

  The buzzer sounded again. He answered for the third time. “What!”

  “Which floor?”

  “Third.”

  “OK. On my way,” said the voice. It was still a lone voice.

  When Pernazzo opened the door, the cop was alone. “Permesso?”

  Pernazzo halted his retreat down the corridor. A policeman about to arrest for murder does not come alone, then ask for permission to enter. He turned around and checked out the visitor, sizing him up, looking for his weak points.

  He was a tall man, forty-ish, heavily built. Similar to Clemente, but not as soft. Except the cop seemed like he’d be more ready for an unexpected attack. He bent his face forward slightly as he examined Pernazzo.

  Over the next half hour, this policeman invaded Pernazzo’s life, derided him, took over the apartment, inspected things, touched objects, expressed disgust, suspected everything, reviled him as a loser. Pernazzo felt seasick with nerves and rage. Then the cop took the peanut butter label.

  He could have gone to his bedroom, returned with the knife, and stuck the fucker there and then, and he wanted to, but he remembered some words of wisdom written on a message board by a champion gamer at a guild meeting: You can never isolate and kill a cop. Like careful mountaineers, they always tell other people where they are going.

  Pernazzo needed to join Alleva as quick as he could now. He needed to be part of a gang. He needed to work fast.

  Before leaving, the visitor handed him a card. Commissioner Alec Blume, it said. The commissioner had laughed out loud at the underdog story, called him a dupe. Alleva used to be a con man, he said. Pernazzo had not considered this possibility.

  But if it was a con… Massoni, who knew his mother had died and left him some money. The big bet on the underdog. Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe underdogs just lost.

  Ten minutes after the police commissioner had left, Massoni buzzed, told him to come downstairs. They were going across town because Alleva wanted to talk.