Milan-Sesto San Giovanni
The journey took somewhere between half an hour and an hour. Or maybe more. He had lost track of time but sensed the distance was not great. It was a short transfer from the vehicle to a damp room via a short few steps that he managed to negotiate without falling. He was thrown nose first against a crumbling wall. Still they left the bag over his head. He asked for it to be taken off, then scrunched up his face waiting for the blow that would inevitably follow. But no one answered and he realized he was alone. He could hear the muffled voices of the men speaking some Balkan or East European language. Probably Romanian, he thought. It sounded like it made sense. Romanian was full of Latin and Italian-sounding words; Albanian was unlike anything else.
Thought fragments and oddly irrelevant questions were forming a disorderly pile in the back of his mind, but they had to wait. He needed to concentrate on not dying from suffocation, on expelling the blood that kept welling up from inside his mouth and making him nauseous. To vomit would be to die. Finally, as an overwhelming question of dignity, he had to concentrate on his bowels. He began to get a rhythm going. Breathe slowly, gently, until someday someone would take this stifling hood off his head. Spit softly into the fabric to keep the blood and saliva from sliding down his throat and making him sick. Tighten the sphincter and clench the stomach muscles when the cold rush of liquid fear hit the base of his gut. The thing to remember was that they had the wrong person. As soon as they discovered their mistake, they would let him go. He had to be careful not to look at them and not to hear any names. He was able to move his fingers a little behind his back. He could use his right hand to feel the wedding ring on his left. Inside the ring were his wife’s name and the date of their marriage twenty-two years ago. He closed a finger and thumb over it and started easing it off.
He was not ready to die, even though that very morning he had given a thoughtful little speech on the question of ageing and death in front of his wife and his children, sleepy-eyed and outraged at being dragged out of their summer-morning beds. They already felt underprivileged to be in Milan at the end of August when everyone else was still on holiday. The trips to France in June, the holiday camps in July, and the two weeks on the Argentario counted for nothing, evidently.
‘Happy belated birthday,’ Letizia had said, giving him the book on trees. He had kissed her on the cheek. She moved her lips up to meet his, but he’d gone for the cheek, because, well, the children. But now he regretted it. He should have kissed her on the lips. He felt his wedding band slip over his knuckle. Then he had kissed Sofia on the head, run his fingers through his son’s hair, and said, ‘Get a haircut, Lorenzo. You look like a girl.’
Lorenzo was showing signs of wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps. Statistics, mathematics, probability puzzles. He and Lorenzo always had football, number tricks and puzzles to keep them in contact with each other. But his daughter Sofia had floated to a planet so far away that communications between them had become infrequent and asynchronous.
His right hand was cramping, and his wrist hurt from the effort, but he had managed to free the wedding ring from the fat of his finger. He crooked his fingertip to stop the ring from falling off immediately.
Someone entered the room. Something scraped, thin metal against cement, the hollow tube of a chair leg, followed by a fizz of static as synthetic fibres brushed plastic as the person sat down inches from him. Fingers touched his throat without violence. Then another hand, moved in under his chin, as Letizia sometimes did when she was adjusting his tie before he left in the morning. Behind his back, he straightened his finger and allowed the ring to slip into his right hand, where he nestled it protectively in the hollow made by his thumb and the edge of his palm.
The hands left his neck and the hood was lifted. Fresh cool air rushed across his face, down his mouth, up his nostrils, through his hair. It was like riding the waves in a speedboat. He looked up into the face of the man who had freed him from the constriction and darkness, unable to keep the gratitude out of his eyes. His thoughts began to clear as the oxygen returned to his brain and his eyes focused. He was in an abandoned place that smelled of urine and wet cement. He started talking.
‘We don’t have much money. I have a ski chalet in Aprica, just one bedroom, not worth all that much. My Generali stock options are worth 172,000 euros. I have 90,000 in the bank plus two online accounts that transfer to that account only, so I would have to be the one to do that. They have about 20,000 each in them. I lost money on the stock market. My parents rent their house and live on a state pension. Even if Letizia — that’s my wife, as you probably know — even if she sells the house to get me back, which she could hardly do without the authorities finding out and freezing my assets, you’re not going to get much more than a million, and… seeing as there are several of you…’ He thought of the Romanian words he had heard them speak. ‘Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘Shut up,’ said the man. ‘I’m not interested. If I want you to talk, I’ll tell you to talk.’ The voice was plaintive and resentful, as if his captor was the one having the wrong inflicted upon him. The speaker was a terrone, one of those brutal southern peasants whose unwelcome presence in Milan was one of the reasons the Northern League had become so popular. He wasn’t so good with the accents of the Mezzogiorno. He knew his captor was not Neapolitan. Neapolitans always sounded enthusiastic and friendly and on the verge of telling a joke. This was a more lugubrious southern accent, not Apulia. Sicily or Calabria — Calabria, probably. Where his own grandfather had come from.
‘Working in insurance doesn’t mean I can get my hands on money. I don’t have access to funds… I’m only middle management. I’m not very good at my job. I can’t keep up with the latest computer algorithms. I have no knowledge or privileges.’
‘Is that what you do, insurance?’ said the man.
The man had opened his legs a little and bent his head down, like an adult watching a child at play on the floor. Forties, tracksuit, overweight. He smelled of cigarettes, cologne, and something rubbery.
‘You don’t know what I do?’ said Matteo, hope rushing into him like the air had a minute before.
‘The Romanians said you worked in an office. They didn’t go any deeper than that. No need.’
‘Ah, you must have the wrong person, then,’ he tried to sound professional and politely apologetic, like the indemnification guys did when rejecting a claim.
The man held out Matteo’s wallet, pulled out his frayed identity card. ‘You are the person I want. Matteo Arconti, a Calabrian name?’
‘My grandfather came from there,’ said Matteo.
Like a conjurer, his captor produced the book on trees from behind his back. ‘This was in your pocket. You like trees?’
‘No — yes. I don’t know.’
The man opened the book, looked through a few pages in the middle, and neatly pulled one out, then crumpled it up in his hand. He stepped over, and slipped the book back into Matteo’s jacket pocket. As he did so, Matteo caught sight of a black pistol tucked into the man’s elasticized waistband. The absence of a holster caused him despair. It meant his captor did not generally carry a weapon. So, if he had a weapon now, it had to be for a specific and immediate purpose. At the back of his mind, a version of himself was marvelling at the clarity of his thinking, promising to save the memory for later telling once this was over.
But how would it end? Matteo bent his head down, muffling his voice against his chest in the hope that a lack of clarity in the question would elicit a lack of clarity in the response. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
The man pulled up his tracksuit, scratched his stomach, and picked absently at the thick black hairs around his belly button, then pulled down his tracksuit again, slipping the gun into his hand as he did so.
Matteo tucked his thumb deeper into his palm and rebalanced the ring. If he launched it behind him and his captor never noticed, it might serve as a posthumous message for the people who came looking for him when it was too late, and it would tell his wife he was thinking of her. At least he hoped she’d take it that way. But throwing away the ring was also throwing away hope.
‘Why me? I have no connections to anything. I have never harmed anyone, or stolen anything.’
‘We have to bow before the hand of fate.’
Matteo flipped his thumb upwards and sent his wedding ring spinning away into the darkness behind him, for anyone who was looking for him. He began speaking to hide any clinking sound of the gold hitting the floor. ‘I have… I have done nothing all my life. And I’m not ready. I’m still learning things, you saw that. Trees.’
‘I don’t want to explain it. Basically, from your point of view, there’s no explanation,’ said the man, standing up and raising the pistol, which had a short fat barrel. He pointed it at him.
‘I have a family! Two children!’ Matteo’s fear was tinged with outrage. ‘And I am so obviously not the person you want. There must be another person with the same name! No one is making you do this, you understand that, right? Listen, like me, you probably have children, don’t you?’
The man shot him in the heart, then the head.
Minchia che rumore! The noise in the concrete chamber had assaulted his ears and made him angry. He called in the two Romanians. ‘Take this heap of shit down to Rome tomorrow. Do it at night. Dump it at Piazzale Clodio. There are some wide-open spaces there without buildings overlooking. Stay away from restricted traffic zones, cameras, and police, and drive so as not to be noticed. Right, who took his wallet and watch? Come on. Keep the watch, if you want to wear a dead man’s watch… but I need the wallet.’
He held out his hand, not bothering to see which of the Romanians returned it to him. ‘Keep whatever money you found, but leave everything else, especially his ID card. Leave the book in his pocket. It’s a nice touch.’