Gang of Lovers (6 page)

When I did it, she looked at the duffel bag that now contained all my worldly possessions and pointed to the door. “Good luck,” was all she said before closing the bedroom door behind her.

I slipped out of her life with a feeling of death in my heart. As I was driving straight to the airport, I did my best to justify my actions, telling myself that in the world I came from, when a friend calls you, nothing else really counts for much.

I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, where Max was waiting for me. I found him at the duty-free shop as he was loading up on foie gras and French chocolates.

I gave him a hug. “I hadn't heard there was a famine in Lebanon.”

“Always best to stock up, just in case,” he retorted, showing me a bottle of Calvados.

We waited for our flight to be called in a nondescript bar disguised as a brasserie. The staff hated travelers passing through and treated them with a brazen and relentless rudeness.

Max was in the mood for a fight but I managed to calm him down. “In all this time, neither one of us felt the urge to reach out to the other. Are we still friends?” I asked.

“What a bullshit question,” he replied, pretending to be offended. “The truth is that you've been so clingy over the past few years that a little distance was necessary, therapeutic even.”

“I almost never thought about you and I never missed you at all.”

The fat man gave me a level stare with his pale blue eyes. “As far as that goes, I haven't exactly been wallowing in nostalgia either,” he shot back, changing his tone of voice. “You want to play truth or dare? I'm happy to. That fucking gang war ruined our lives and we needed time and distance from everything that might remind us of what we'd been through. Even our dearest friends.”

As he spoke, I sized him up attentively. He was tan, and even if he hadn't lost so much as an ounce, he was still looking pretty fit.

“What have you been doing all this time, Max?” I asked, my curiosity aroused.

“Are you already tired of playing the game?”

“Yes, just answer my question.”

“I worked in an alpine hut in the mountains.”

“So that's why you look like Friar Tuck from Robin Hood,” I joked. “Didn't Beniamino set you up with some of the take from the robbery?”

“Of course he did. But I didn't spend much of it, in fact for once in my life I even managed to set a little something aside.”

I leaned over the table. “What's happened to you?”

“Nothing. It's just that I didn't know where to go or what to do. I traveled around a little, hitting Padua, Venice, and Treviso, and then I lucked into this opportunity.”

“A woman? A shrink with her office in a mountain hut?”

“No. A guy I knew from the university. He needed someone to help out in the kitchen.”

“And how did you like it?”

“Just fine. In the winter I went a little further downhill and I set down roots in a small town in Cadore where there are fewer and fewer tourists every season and the ski lifts are just rusty souvenirs of the past . . .”

“That must have been a load of fun.”

“Actually, it was,” he replied, smiling. “A nice house, a fireplace, plenty of books, and a lady who likes men with a gut.”

“But?”

“I miss the life we used to live, our investigations, my archives. Don't you?”

“I don't know, Max. Maybe. It also depends on what's waiting for us in Beirut. Until yesterday I was living with a woman I love.”

“Your Ninon. Beniamino told me about it.”

“You stayed in touch?” I asked, surprised.

“Every now and then.”

“But you have no idea what's happened in Lebanon?”

“No. But I'm pretty sure that whatever it was, it'll kill our good moods for a while.”

 

Waiting for us at the airport were Talal and Wiam, the two Druze who had until then been in charge of Sylvie's security. They greeted us courteously but they had changed since the first time we'd met them. They were curved, bent, as if they'd been carrying a heavy weight on their shoulders, their faces sliced by a bitter grimace as thin as a scar from a razor. I decided that old Rossini must have given them quite the going over after finding out that Natalija Dini´c could have hit Sylvie at the time of her choosing. But too much time had gone by since then, and they still had their jobs. So it had to be something else.

Max tried to pry a little information out of them, but they both pretended not to understand French anymore.

Sylvie lived in a beautiful three-story beach house overlooking an ugly beach. But the views of the city and of the water were enchanting. The building dated from the sixties and the landlord had decorated it somewhat eccentrically. There were lots of paintings hanging on the walls but not a single photograph. And the framed paintings depicted landscapes completely devoid of human beings.

Beniamino welcomed us in the big living room, sitting in an armchair. He didn't get up to greet us. He pointed us to the couch.

“Thanks for coming,” he said in a low voice. “It wasn't me who asked you to come. It was Sylvie.”

He couldn't bring himself to go on. He stood up and hurried over to grab a crystal pitcher and pour himself a glass of water. He gulped it down in the manner of someone who hadn't had a drink in some time.

“She's decided to take her life, and she wants to say goodbye to you.”

Max the Memory's eyes filled with tears. I remained dry-eyed, but I had to call on all my self-control in order to keep from crying out in despair.

We sat in silence, drowning in grief. Our shared personal code kept us from appealing to any presumptive common sense, from grabbing Beniamino and crying out: “Stop her! Convince her to live!” From throwing ourselves at Sylvie's feet and imploring her.

In our world, a person was free, even to end her own life, and no one would ever claim the right to raise his voice in dissent. People's choices had to be respected, even if they made your heart and your brain bleed. Which is why it was the right thing to do: to announce your imminent suicide and leave this world surrounded by friends, because nothing could be worse than to say farewell in loneliness and secrecy out of the fear you might wind up in an institution. Our outlaw hearts were big enough; they could—they would—accept it.

“I'll go get her,” Rossini muttered.

A short while later he returned, arm in arm with the woman he loved, the woman for whom he'd fought and suffered. Sylvie was beautiful, but I couldn't help remembering how Natalija Dini´c had modified her own body to resemble her.

As usual, she kissed us each on both cheeks and on the forehead. She was strangely serene.

“From the looks on your faces I have to assume that Beniamino has already told you the news,” she said in a calm voice. “I know that I don't have to explain the reasons behind my decision, but we've been friends for so many years that it seems only right to share my rationale with you.

“I'm sad to say that the wounds to my heart have never healed. I've been subjected to too much violence by too many people. I was raped, I was used as a plaything, I was tortured, forced to dance for mobs of men, after which they'd unleash their lust and anger on me like a herd of pigs.

“Nothing has been able to help me forget, not the endless love offered by Beniamino, not the finest medical therapies. Not even the passage of time. Life has become, now, intolerable. Only death is strong enough to sweep away this dull pain that hounds me even in my sleep. I need peace.

“Now that Natalija Dini´c is dead and the gang war is over, there are no more obligations forcing me to go on living.”

She smiled at us, gazing intently into our eyes. I wondered how long she'd been ready to put an end to the game that had been lost from the very beginning.

Wiam served the aperitifs with tears streaking his face. Sylvie, determined to break the wall of our sorrowful silence, forced us to chat. She asked me all about Ninon, and Max sang the praises of a beautiful winter in the mountains.

At the dinner table she asked whether we would be going back to the Veneto to live. But she didn't wait to hear the answer. “When I met Beniamino I was dancing in a nightclub in Oderzo and I was going around on a wonderful motorcycle. It's almost as if I can still feel the sharp winter air lashing my face,” she remembered, a moment before setting her silverware down on her plate and throwing herself out the window.

The thud of her body hitting the white and blue tiles in the courtyard below was bloodcurdling.

I started to get up but Rossini shook his head, his face pale, his hands clutching the edge of the table. “Talal and Wiam will see to her body. Sylvie was very clear in her wishes,” he said in a broken voice. “There will be no funeral, she wishes to be buried at sea, in the waters just off this villa. We can go now.”

“She could still be alive, she might need our help,” I hissed in a choking voice. “Beniamino, please.”

“Cut it out, Marco. There's nothing we can do, and I feel as if I'm losing my mind.”

An hour later we were studying the departures board for the first flight that would take us away from Beirut once and for all. I was engulfed by a surging tide of sensations and having a hard time getting a grip on reality. My outlaw heart couldn't seem to come to terms with the death of a person so dear to me, a person who had stood up right in the middle of dinner and jumped out the window. I lost sight of Max and Beniamino and found myself on a flight to Rome, where I would connect to another flight that would take me to Cagliari, Sardinia. The temptation to go back to Ninon had been powerful, almost overwhelmingly so, but I wasn't enough of a bastard to use her to work through my feelings of grief and defeat. In the end, Natalija Dini´c had claimed her revenge.

While the customs agents were searching my luggage for the drugs that I couldn't possibly not be transporting, given that I was an ex-convict on my way back from Lebanon, I called Beniamino. I wanted to let him know how much I cared about him. He didn't pick up.

I
was staying in a three-star hotel that deserved no more than two, in a narrow, ancient alley in the Marina quarter. Breakfast time was long past and I had to settle for an espresso. The proprietor's mother-in-law was subjecting me, as she did every morning, to a rapid-fire burst of questions about my private life, to which I didn't bother to respond. She had figured out that I was a good for nothing and wanted to prove the fact to that idiot son-in-law of hers.

Her convictions about me suddenly began to vacillate when she saw a refined and elegantly attired lady walk in and head in my direction.

“I decided it might be better to move our appointment up to lunchtime,” the Swiss woman said, skipping right over the conventional hellos.

“How did you find me?”

“Giannella took care of it. She got the address from a certain . . .”

“Max,” I said, finishing her sentence for her while I wondered why the fat man was scheming to get me to talk to that woman at all costs.

“I don't understand why Counselor Marzolo doesn't bother to protect my privacy,” I complained. “I think I may have to get a new lawyer.”

“I'm sure she'll be able to handle the disappointment. Shall we go?”

I looked at my watch. “But it's not even noon yet. Signora, this is Cagliari, no one is going to serve us lunch at this time of day.”

The shrew at the reception desk snickered audibly, and I took advantage of the opportunity to suggest renewing our evening appointment, an appointment I didn't have the slightest intention of keeping. But the lady must have smelled a rat and she insisted on an aperitif and lunch.

“All right,” I said, giving in. “But first I need to make a phone call.”

I went off to a small side room and called Max. I hadn't talked to him since the night Sylvie had decided to end her life.

“Where are you now?” I asked.

“Back in the alpine hut.”

“Why did you send that intolerable woman after me?”

“Because Sylvie is dead, Natalija is dead, and that whole story is dead and buried.”

“And so?”

“Now we can . . . now we
must
go back to our old lives.”

“This sounds like an argument a married couple might have, and you and I aren't one, Max. Plus we've said this too many times, too recently, and it's never worked.”

“Let's start the old business back up. It's the only thing we know how to do.”

“Times have changed and we're out of the game. We don't even have a house in Padua anymore.”

He started shouting. “What the fuck's wrong with you? Why won't you listen to me? I can't take it anymore, don't you get it? I'm falling apart.”

I raised my voice in response. “I've already fallen apart! I don't know why I don't just drink myself to death.”

My friend fell silent for a long time, and then asked: “Do you mean that?”

I sighed. “No. I'm just at the end of my rope. The sound of Sylvie's body hitting the tiles in the courtyard keeps ringing in my ears and I can't get it out of my mind.”

“I was there that night too.”

It was my turn to fall silent.

“I'm begging you, listen to what the Swiss woman has to say and then call me back,” the fat man suggested.

“Max, I can't think clearly.”

“I'm begging you.”

“Okay.”

 

I found myself sitting at a small table in a café, sipping a Canossian Sister and stuffing my mouth with salted peanuts. The lady didn't seem able to make up her mind. Neither to drink nor to tell her story.

“I'm listening,” I said.

“And I'm waiting for you to stop gorging yourself on cocktail nuts.”

It occurred to me only she could have used the term “cocktail nuts.” I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand. “Excuse me, I skipped breakfast.”