Wu Ming - 54

Zollo went in and ordered a coffee. Then he asked where the phone was.

The barman pointed to it.

He picked up the receiver and dialled the number.

A young woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’

‘I need to make an international call.’

‘Where to?’

‘Paris.’

‘Please give me the number.’

Zollo read out the digits, giving her time to jot them down.

*

In a bar in rue des Abbesses, in Paris, the phone rang three times before a fat, sweaty man picked up the receiver.

‘Allô?’

The clear voice of the operator said, ‘A call from Italy. One moment, please.’

An Italian-American accent butted in: ‘Lyonnese Toni, please.’

‘Toni? Attendez, monsieur .’

The fat man set down the receiver on the bar and walked through the gloomy bar, rubbing his neck. He opened a door at the back and entered a little smoke-filled room. Four people were sitting around the circular table. The green top was scattered with fiches and cigarette burns. Cigarette butts spilled from two glass ashtrays.

The fat man turned to one of the gamblers. ‘Toni. Téléphone .’

An emaciated man, a cigarette dangling between his lips, eyes half closed, replied with a grunt. He looked at his cards: two aces and two eights. The dead man’s hand. Merde . A glance at the pile of fiches . He was already 10,000 down and it was his turn to call. He picked up everything in front of him and put it in the middle of the table. He folded his cards together and got to his feet. His exhausted muscles responded after a delay: it must have been about ten in the morning. They had been playing for twelve hours.

As he headed for the telephone, he was seized by a coughing fit that left him breathless. He spat into his handkerchief, and when he folded it up it was full of blood He heard the men in the other room exchanging useless comments. ‘That lunatic should look after himself’, ‘If he goes on like that he’s going to pop his clogs’, ‘He should stop smoking like a Turk.’ Hypocritical fools. After tapping a load of money out of him, they worried about his health.

He went behind the bar, poured himself a generous shot of brandy, then picked up the phone.

‘Ouais?’

‘Lyonnese Toni?’

‘C’est moi.’

‘Zollo.’

‘ Zollò , it was high time to hear from you.’

Apart from his pronunciation, his Italian was good. He’d consorted with more immigrants than an Antwerp whore.

‘Still interested in this deal?’

Toni gulped down the brandy and felt it burning his guts like redhot iron.

‘Sure. The way the poker’s going, I’m going to have to make it up somehow.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘ Rien , nothing. When do you think you’ll be ready?’

‘In two months. I’m going to need all the money. Clean.’

‘ Pas possible. Non . I haven’t got that much. But if I have a sample of the goods, I can get it valued by a guy I know who’s interested in the whole deal. He’s willing to pay the figure you’re asking.’

There was silence at the other end of the line. Toni felt he could hear Zollo thinking.

‘ Zollò , no one buys blind, you know that. This person trusts me. Give me a sample and I’ll let you have the money.’

‘I’ll be in Marseille in about two months because of Luciano. And he’ll have the sample.’

‘Not in Marseilles, too dangerous, the walls have ears.’

‘Where, then?’

‘Cannes.’

Another silence.

Then: ‘Ok, Cannes in two months. But tell your friend the price stays as it is. I don’t want any nonsense.’

‘Don’t worry, I told you, he’s loaded. If it’s good stuff, he’ll pay.’

‘I’ll call you on the same number in exactly twenty days.’

‘ Bon , I’ll be here.’

The communication was interrupted.

Lyonnese Toni drank down a second glass, and returned to the poker table.

Someone had matched his cards.

He set down two pairs.

The other man put down three tens. Of course.

Toni repressed a cough, the taste of blood in his mouth. His ashen face contemplated the cards without any particular expression. He remembered why they called it the dead man’s hand. History related that when a glory-hunter fired into the back of ‘Wild’ Bill Hickok’s head, he was sitting at the green table holding a hand of two aces and two eights. God knows why he had turned his back to the door.

Toni got up, slipped on his jacket, put the money on the table and went out without saying goodbye to anyone. As he raised the shutter and the light of the morning burned his eyes, he heard them talking in low voices.

‘He hasn’t got long to go’, ‘He should get some treatment’, ‘He can’t go on like that’.

Bloody jinx. He walked along the street and disappeared behind the first corner.

Chapter 30

Bologna, 23 March

The warehouse stood right next to the building site for the new hospital. When it was finished, it would be the biggest in Europe.

The entrance was obstructed by the trailer of a lorry. Pierre slipped into the narrow passage between the lorry and the wall. It was hot inside, with a smell of damp and petrol. Two boys not much older than himself were unloading big tin drums and lining them up against the wall.

‘Hi,’ said Pierre. ‘I’m supposed to talk to Ettore.’

‘Ettore? He was here until ten minutes ago, then he left, but he should be back soon.’

‘Can I wait here?’

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ replied the younger of the boys, and without stopping his work he pointed to a chair at the back of the shed.

Beside the chair, two men were talking and studying some pieces of paper. Pierre preferred not to disturb them and leaned against the wall. He lit a cigarette to kill some time, but felt like a halfwit when one of the men pointed out that the drums contained fuel and smoking near them wasn’t the best idea in the world.

He stubbed out the cigarette against the wall and slipped it back into the pack. He couldn’t stay long, he had left the bar on an insignificant errand, and Nicola had got out on the wrong side of bed that morning.

The boys seemed to be tireless, and were still hard at work around the lorry. From the little that he knew, everyone who worked with Ettore had a partisan past, and those two must have taken up arms before the age of eighteen. The hardest of them came from the ‘Red Star’, the others had been later additions. Gas said there were about fifteen of them in all. The boss was called Bianco, but he was sick, and now he followed the business from a distance, having been replaced by Ettore on the ground.

The two men studying the papers raised their voices. Raised voices, harsh words. The men doing the unloading stopped halfway between the lorry and the wall, glancing towards them. One of the two had grabbed the other by the jacket, and was shouting in his face. ‘You’ll pay for that, you son of a bitch, you’ll pay me the lot, right now!’

The drums rolled to the ground, the noise bouncing off the ceiling.

The one who had been grabbed by the jacket wriggled free. The boys went and stood next to him. The other man was training a pistol on him.

‘Tell your mate to come over here too,’ Pierre heard him say, but without giving him time to finish, he dashed towards the lorry and climbed underneath it, wriggling towards the exit on his elbows.

When he re-emerged, clutching the back mudguard, he found himself looking at a pair of legs and a pointed gun. He felt something like the blow of an enormous weight around his heart, and hid his head under his arm.

‘Come out quietly,’ a voice whispered. ‘No nonsense.’