Джанрико Карофильо - Rome Noir

Life for me has always been a mystery; in fact, I’ve never done anything very well. At the Forbidden City, however, things seemed clear as daylight: Watch and don’t buy. If you understood this simple rule you could come back whenever you wanted. Every night, even.

“I understand, but then why do you come?”

Can you believe it? I said that it helped me put my ideas in order. Looking at the girls I was able to concentrate, focus better on the pieces that I had to send to the newspapers I worked for. At dawn I went home and typed out on the computer what I had mentally written at the Forbidden City.

“You’re saying that you come here to work?”

“In a certain sense,” I confirmed shamelessly.

“Then my conversation has disturbed you.”

“No problem. You have to disconnect the plug from time to time.”

“Very true.” At that point Yichang introduced himself. He told me his name and I told him mine. We shook hands.

We toasted our meeting with our beer bottles.

“I must confess something to you.” He paused, then: “I’ve studied you closely over the past few months, you know.”

I looked at him. Part of me foresaw that this man had in mind a precise plan.

“Your detachment is admirable. I wonder how you manage not to let yourself get involved in the situation. I mean, many of these creatures would be capable of bringing a dead man to life. What’s the matter, don’t you like women?”

“Oh no, I like them a lot. I told you, I come for other reasons.”

“Yes. You will agree, however, that your behavior is not like everyone else’s.”

I shrugged.

“However that may be, it’s good for you. No offense, you Italians risk being stung by those creatures. You’re not used to a certain type of woman. You let yourself be fooled by their childlike behavior, by their tender, defenseless ways. But they’re not at all defenseless. They’re whores. I’ve seen many Italians like you come here sure of themselves, they choose a girl, and take it all as a game. They end up badly. Then there are those who fall in love and end up worse. They get it in their heads to take the whore away, they think that underneath they’re good girls. They couldn’t make a more serious mistake. There are no good girls here. Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian. All the same, all whores. And whores are like scorpions. You know the story of the scorpion, I imagine.”

“Of course,” I said distractedly, trying to convey that all this talk was starting to annoy me.

“With these girls it’s the same. You can’t expect them to change their nature. It’s something that you Italians tend to forget because of appearances. You know what some of them are capable of doing?”

“Cutting off your dick,” I said brusquely. I couldn’t take it anymore. The little lesson on the traps of the Forbidden City was really too much.

Yichang felt the blow, or at least so it seemed to me. “I see that you are informed.”

What had he taken me for, one of those fools who came down from the north in search of exotic adventures? I didn’t speak Chinese, but certain stories reached my ears anyway. Stories of girls who castrated clients because they hadn’t paid, or maybe simply because they’d begun a relationship with another whore, as if a man can’t have all the girls he wants. When they established that they had to break it off with you for good, they took you to bed without letting anything show — Asians are masters of hiding their rancor. Between one caress and another they gave you something to drink, and within a few minutes you were paralyzed.

It seems incredible that concoctions like that exist, and yet it’s true. I don’t know where they get it, but these girls have a kind of drug that immobilizes you. You’re conscious but you can’t move a finger. And while you’re in this condition, they... well, you understand, they reserve you a front-row seat so that you can enjoy the show.

I got up, intending to go home. The night was ruined.

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

He detained me by resting a hand on my arm. “I hope I didn’t bother you with my conversation.”

“No, I’m just a little tired. Besides, I have an article to finish for tomorrow.”

“I understand.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, he asked me, “Do you live far away?”

I thought he would continue to bore me with his talk as he walked me home, so I told him the truth. “No, just around the corner.”

“You live in this neighborhood?”

“Yes, why?”

“Nothing, it’s just that a journalist... This is a poor neighborhood, dirty, noisy. Not exactly elegant.”

“It’s convenient,” I said.

“Convenient for what?” He didn’t give me time to answer. “Sit down. I have a proposal to make that might interest you. What would you say to living on Via Veneto? You know the Hotel Excelsior?”

Of course I knew it, a luxury hotel far beyond my reach.

“It’s no longer a hotel, and I’m sure that a professional like you can afford to pay a hundred euros for a suite.”

I was open-mouthed — it was less than half of what I paid for the one-room apartment, three hundred square feet, in Piazza Vittorio. Yichang explained that the Excelsior, after having been closed for several months, had been bought by a friend of his who had converted it into apartments. Almost all the apartments were already rented to very fashionable Chinese people. There was one, however, still free. Yichang’s friend was having difficulty finding a tenant because years ago a famous person had killed himself there. “One of those rock stars with long hair and torn jeans. I don’t remember his name.”

“You mean Kurt Cobain?”

Yichang snapped his fingers. “That’s right. You know, we Chinese are a superstitious people. Many of us believe in ghosts and don’t like to sleep in a room where someone took a gun and blew his brains out.”

I avoided explaining to him that things hadn’t gone exactly like that. It was more convenient that he and his Chinese friends continue to believe that Cobain had killed himself in the Hotel Excelsior.

“So do you think it might interest you?”

It might, yes. The prospect of moving to Via Veneto, of living in the city where I was born like a Russian prince in exile, attracted me quite a lot. And for only a hundred euros a month!

Yichang said he would introduce me to the manager of the Excelsior as soon as possible, maybe the following night. I didn’t know how to thank him. I wanted to repay him in some way, but Yichang waved his hands and shook his head, he wouldn’t even speak of it. He ordered another beer, made some comments about a girl, then wrinkled his forehead as if he had suddenly remembered something.

“There might be one thing,” he said. “Would you like to play a little card game?”

“Cards?”

“Yes. You know how to play poker?”

Obviously I knew the rules of poker, but I wasn’t at all the typical player. To tell the truth, cards had always bored me. But Yichang insisted, and when I tried to demonstrate my indifference to games of chance, he said, “What a lot of big words. I’m just proposing a little game among friends to pass the time. Nominal bets, just small change, enough to add some excitement. Come on, you can’t say no.”

Little game, big words. His way of speaking in diminutives and augmentatives made me uneasy. But he was right, I couldn’t refuse. Not if I really wanted to move to Via Veneto.

I returned home at 9 in the morning. I lay on the bed and, staring at the blades of the fan rotating above me, I thought over the bizarre events of the night. Or rather, the events that I should have found bizarre but that at the moment appeared to me only manna fallen from heaven.