The Night of Rome

Carlo Bonini, Giancarlo de Cataldo

• Publisher: World Noir
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781609455279
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literature
• Index: Literature

When an Italian kingpin falls, a battle of successors begins in this "razor-sharp political thriller set in Berlusconi's Rome" ( The New Statesman ). Things are changing in Rome. The new Pope, determined to reform the Vatican, proclaims an extraordinary Jubilee year, one "of Mercy." A new center-left government replaces its disgraced predecessor. And with the underworld kingpin Samurai in jail, his protégé Sebastiano Laurenti plans to establish himself as his designated successor. But to do it, he must reckon with a new generation of gangsters and racketeers edging in on the corrupt profits to be made off the Jubilee's public works. Meanwhile, Laurenti must also keep an eye on the ambitious newly elected politician Chiara Visone. As the sharks circle and the street-dogs fight, a tenuous hope endures. An incorruptible politician of the old left is about to forge an unlikely alliance with a young bishop who refuses to play the Vatican's power games. Sharp, dark, and taut, The Night of Rome is fiction that sails dangerously close to the wind of current events.

THE NIGHT OF ROME

PROLOGUE
APRIL 8TH, 2015

Sebastiano Laurenti was contemplating the spectacle of chaos from behind the tinted windows of the black Audi A6.

Rome was burning.

For five days now the city had been on its knees. Immobi­lized by a wildcat public transportation strike. Submerged by the total cessation of garbage collections. Suffocating from the stench of the bonfires that the enraged citizens were setting on street corners.

It had all begun when a young girl in Tor Sapienza filed a criminal complaint, stating that she’d been attacked by two negroes. The outlying areas had immediately burst into open revolt.

Rome was burning.

The revolt had exploded against the welcome centers for immigrants. In the grim subdivisions known as borgate, gypsies became the targets of vigilante squads. Young Roma children stopped attending schools. There were checkpoints established around the gypsy camps. There was a smell of pogrom in the air.

Press from around the world descended on Rome. In the dispatches they filed, a nine-column nightmare. A criminal blockbuster that filled prime-time television screens. The memory of Naples buried in garbage during that city’s recent strikes paled in comparison. In his Easter homily, Pope Francis had issued a heartfelt appeal to mankind’s sense of mercy. And even more than that, an appeal to its sense of humanity, if such a thing still stirred. The prime minister had formed a standing crisis unit at the Palazzo del Viminale, headquarters of Italy’s Ministry of the Interior and therefore of its national law enforcement agencies. The unit included representatives from emergency management, police, firefighters, and the armed forces.

But there wasn’t a bulldozer, garrison, armored van, or street patrol capable of reversing or even halting the collapse.

It was as if the city had decided to curl up and shut itself off, swallowing everyone and everything up in a subterranean miasma of resentment, hatred, and misery.

Gangs of ultras put aside their mutual hatreds and set out to wreak systematic devastation on Italy’s capital. The metro station of Vigna Clara had blown up, a strategic location for the imminent inauguration of the jubilee of mercy, proclaimed just the month before by Pope Francis.

Anarchist graffiti appeared, taking credit for the explosion.

Nobody believed them.

The authorities, with the mayor out front, wandered listlessly from one garrison to another. The authorities spoke optimistically, reassured the populace, and made promises they would never keep. The authorities didn’t understand. What was happening in Rome eluded any logic.

And he had been the engine driving all of this. Sebastiano.

A tall, restrained, sober young man. Destroying Rome hadn’t been his purpose, it had only been a means to an end.

Deep down, he just hoped it would all be resolved to everyone’s best interests.

The bonfires, glowing dirty red in the sunset, gave him no pleasure, no pride. If anything, a faint, unpleasant annoyance.

Sebastiano didn’t love war.

Sebastiano was a builder of peace.

He dialed a phone number in London.

He’d been little more than a child when he’d had his life stolen from him. He’d learned early that there was only one way to take back possession of his life.

Violence.

On the fourth ring, a woman’s voice answered. Alex.

The accounts had all been transferred to the new branches of various banks on the Turks and Caicos Islands. No snafus or problems. The woman from Rome had phoned Alex. She was upset about the sudden, tragic death of Frodo.

“So what did you say?”

“I told her that you were very angry at her, Sebastiano.”

“Thanks, Alex.”

“Seba . . . ”

“Yes?”

“Don’t hurt her, okay? Not unless it’s strictly necessary, I mean.”

Sebastiano said nothing. That’s not the point, Alex.

The point is how badly she hurt me.

ONE MONTH EARLIER

I.
THURSDAY, MARCH 12TH, 2015
Saint’s Day: Pope St. Gregory I

VIA SANNIO. ST. JOHN’S BASILICA. SIX IN THE MORNING.

The sign stated: “Public Works Contract for Station, Rome Metro Company. Contracted Company, Mariani Construc­­tion s.p.a., Member of the Metro C Consortium. Project for the Construction of the C Line. T3 Lot. Line Running from Piazza San Giovanni to the Imperial Forums.”

The man pulled the woolen watch cap down over his ears, shivered slightly in his gleaming black bomber jacket, and impatiently scanned the flashing stoplights that illuminated the deserted expanse of Piazza San Giovanni. At his side, his buddy, a mountain of muscles with a neck set deep between his broad shoulders, shook his head. He pulled his smartphone from his jacket pocket and checked the time. Six AM. Not so much as a whiff of this asshole’s stench. At least it had stopped raining.

The arrival of the red Fiat Panda compact driven by the construction supervisor Lucio Manetti was blanketed by the screeching passage of an empty trolley. Manetti parked in the usual place. And then, as he did every morning, he hovered for a moment inside the car, performing his odd, neurotic ritual dance around the car. Doors locked, check. Headlights off, yes. Running lights, likewise. Then, with a light tap of his forefinger, he shoved the heavy frame of his Coke-bottle eyeglasses back onto the bridge of his nose, patted his leather portfolio binder, and adjusted the long, pointy umbrella that hung over his forearm. He was late. He didn’t need to glance at his watch to know that. It was enough to see the first slanting shafts of daylight over St. John’s basilica and the accompanying view, which he’d grown to detest in all those years of construction. The view of the cathedral’s dome was blocked by the gigantic support structure for the mole, the tunnel boring machine that rested a hundred feet below ground, where it had sat idle for God knows how long. Months? No, years. He’d lost track. First they’d hit the ruins of a Roman villa. Then pools of water, so that you’d have thought they were digging in the Karst region, with its porous limestone subsoil. Then the protracted holdup with the money. The bulldozers had stopped working. The Calabrian and Neapolitan construction workers hired by the subcontractors had vanished. The only one left watching over the Big Hole now was him. He was the supervisor of a ghost construction site. If for no other reason than that—he thought—he might as well get himself a nice hot espresso before starting his long day of doing nothing. To hell with the schedule. What could five minutes change in the face of that eternally unfinished project?

He walked into the café.

Five minutes later the two men—leaning idly against the rolling shutter gate of the construction site—finally saw him reappear.

“We’re in no hurry, you piece of shit, after all, where do you think you’re going to go?”

The construction supervisor crossed the street with a brisk step, one hand rummaging in the pocket of his raincoat for the keys to the construction site. The morning ahead was packed with things to get done. First off, make a call to the Prefecture. He needed to get new anti-Mafia certificates for two companies being added to the list of subcontractors. Dottor Danilo Mariani had insisted on bringing them into the earthmoving team. Right, of course, anti-Mafia certificates. That was a mouthful, considering. Those guys practically had “Camorra” stamped on their foreheads. Still, the “dottore,” as he insisted on being called, didn’t want to hear any objections. In fact, he’d been pretty brusque.

“Just mind your own fucking business, supervisor. I pay you to do what I tell you. I’m the head of this company. And if you don’t like it, I’ve got lines of construction supervisors out the door who’d be glad to take your job. So pick up your phone, call the Prefecture, and ask for Signora Giada. She’s already been briefed.”

He opened the gate to the construction site. He didn’t even have a chance to hear the two men come up behind him.

They were already lunging at him with all the fury of two rabid dogs.

The first blow hit him on the temple and made his eyeglasses fly off.

The second one shattered his incisors, flooding his mouth with blood.

The third one smashed straight into his left eyeball, practically making it explode.

The pain was so sharp and intense that he was unable even to scream. The two men lifted him up bodily and dragged him toward the large yellow bulldozer at the center of the construction site.

They tied him to the scoop of that monster machine, like a Christ on the cross. That’s when the supervisor Manetti, with his lone right eye, managed to make out the silhouettes of his attackers. They were scrabbling around, retrieving something from the ground.

Sweet Jesus . . . No, not me. Why? Why?

The more heavily built of the two had picked up a bundle of iron rebar. He clutched the sheaf of rods in his right hand as if he were waving a pack of spaghetti. He was laughing. And getting closer. Closer and closer. Until the supervisor was able to catch a whiff of the man’s pestilential breath, which reeked of nicotine and words ...