Wu Ming - 54

Who knows, Fefe. From the first rumbles he got it into his head that he had to get outside, away, into the open. He was always worried that the ceiling might come crashing down on him. The storm itself didn’t really worry him. In fact, he said he liked the rain, the smell of damp grass, the ‘clean world’ as he called it. They locked him up in his room, officially ‘to ensure that he didn’t fall ill’. In fact, during the warmest months there was no great risk of colds, and a drop of rain wouldn’t have hurt him. Afterwards, though, he had to be undressed, dried, dressed again. Even Marco preferred to avoid the whole procedure with a turn of the key. Poor Fefe.

The image of her brother crouching under his bed with the pillow over his ears made Angela’s state of mind even worse than it was already.

Water and hail hammered relentlessly on the glass in bursts. Five minutes like that and the rain would start coming in. On the other hand, even just leaning out to close the shutters would mean getting drenched from the shoulders up.

A fresh clap of thunder drowned the ringing of the phone. When Angela heard Odoacre’s voice, nausea choked her. He was calling from the clinic.

Fefe. A terrible thing. A tragedy.

Chapter 18

Naples, 31 May

Would have been a Thursday evening, that’s right, first time I saw him, in the club, must have been a Thursday evening. I remember, because on Thursdays Frankie ‘the Cockroach’ Pistocchio brought in the new women to show themselves off and ask if there was a job for them. He lined them up, studied them, touched their asses and their tits. They didn’t like that: Frankie was completely disgusting, he thought with his cock, and it was always hard, an animal, he was, and if he hadn’t been a distant cousin of Joe Bananas, he’d never have set foot in the club, let alone worked there. Scaravagghiu , the ‘cockroach’, his mum called him, because when he was a very small boy whenever he played football he came home so absolutely filthy that he looked as though he was covered with shit and piss. As a little boy and, my God, as a grown-up too: an animal. But the fact that he thought with his cock could be useful sometimes, it was as though he had an antenna fixed to his head, he was like a radio that could pick up whether a girl was a slut or a plank in the sack. One glance and he knew if she was a good fuck or if she wasn’t, if she’d let you in the back door, if she liked sucking dick or if she didn’t. A genius, Frankie.

She was a beauty: dark-haired, tall, black eyes and lips you could have stared at for a quarter of an hour. Tits, ass, thighs, everything in the right place. I don’t remember her clothes because I was looking through them, like Superman. I was behind the curtain, peering through the crack. She couldn’t see me, but she was looking in my direction. She knew I was there, and she wasn’t frightened. Frankie felt her tits with those hands that looked like shovels, and she smiled as though to challenge him. Frankie lifted up her skirt to see how she was built under there, and she gave a little laugh. Frankie was all sweaty and filthy, he really did look like a cockroach, and he asked her why the fuck she was laughing. Then he took one of her hands and put it on his dick. She kept it there, gave another little laugh that sounded like a mosquito flying like a bubble of blood after it’s bitten you, and then she said out loud, ‘Is that it?’, looking towards my eye in the gap in the curtain, even though she couldn’t see it.

Frankie went as if to strike her, but before he made that terrible mistake, breaking the face of the best whore he had ever got his hands on, I shouted, ‘Stop!’, then came out and turned towards the girl: ‘Forgive me, miss, but I sometimes wonder what the hell’s going on in the head of this employee of mine.’ I waved away Frankie, who looked as though he was the one who’d been slapped, then said, ‘Listen to me, miss, you’ll be just perfect working for us. What’s your name?’

She looked at my scar, and my right eye a bit lower than the other one, and then she did something no one ever did. Two things. First of all, she didn’t give an immediate reply to my question. Then second, she asked me, ‘What happened to your right cheek, sir?’

My right cheek. I did something I never did, and told her about the time I got attacked in 1929. Then I asked her her name again.

Her name was Mona, the daughter of an Irish father and a half-Italian mother, from the Abruzzi. I told her to come back the following evening, because Friday night is fucking night, it’s pay-day and you take some of it home and the rest you spend on women and drink. That is, I didn’t put it quite like that, I just told her to come back the following evening. But all of a sudden it occurred to me that Mona wasn’t a piece of meat to be chucked in a brothel to work six nights a week. She was poule de luxe to tempt the big guys. And that was exactly what happened. She was a volcano who sent all the customers’ spunk boiling.

The strange thing is that I dreamt about Mona last night. Fuck, I miss that girl. They were good times, we were doing well with the races, the gambling and particularly the whores. We were fucking twice a day, different women, because I might have had a droopy eye but my dick was good and stiff. Even today, even though I’m not as young as I was, I’m still a well-respected cocksman. I have one good fuck a day, and it doesn’t just last three minutes.

Good times, yes, then that great bastard and cocksucker Procurator Dewey, Honest Tom, shows up, and what happens? The whores perjured themselves in court, saying I was the biggest exploiter in the Americas, that I had my fingers in all kinds of pies, may God strike them dead, and among the whores I see Mona, who I’d always had in the palm of my hand, and who I’d given a stack of money to, and I made sure the people she fucked weren’t weirdos. But I’m not pissed off, you know, women are all whores in their minds, not just in their cunts.

The strange thing was that I dreamt about Mona last night. I can’t believe you can end up in jail over a woman.

The really weird thing is that I didn’t dream about the embarkation. In 1946 my lawyers are about to demonstrate that Honest Tom has corrupted, threatened and bribed the witnesses, when they free me on the spot and send me here to Italy, so as not to have me stuck in the middle of the whole mess. Honest Tom wants to stand for the presidency, it’s in everybody’s best interest for me to fuck off to the back of beyond. So it seems strange that the capo di tutti capi was released from prison all of a sudden; they put about the rumour that I have rendered service to the country, talking to the local boys to encourage the Allied landing in Sicily, so they pay me back with freedom and repatriation. Such bullshit that the American admirals still hate me for it.

Now this paisà , Siragusa, wants them to send me to jail, he’s getting in a sweat about the car, and what the fuck does the car have to do with anything? Am I supposed to go about the place in a fucking cinquecento like a bum? The insults would be flying from both sides of the street! The cops are breathing down my neck, that great whore-fucker.

And that other one, that journalist who came last autumn, wants to write a book about me. Without my permission.

Freedom of the press is a fine thing, but it would still be better if we didn’t have it.

Now Steve Cement is heading for Marseilles, so we’re winding up that operation too and thinking about it a bit, because things could change. He’s seemed a bit strange lately. I understand, he’s homesick, our boy, he misses Manhattan and Brooklyn, and maybe he misses the shoemaking job he used to do on the wharf. Here all he gets to do is whack some lowlife over the head with a monkey wrench. Someone with his abilities has no way of distinguishing himself. A good fella, but strange, he barely ever speaks now, and they tell me he’s always hanging out with that boy they call Kociss.