The Colombian Mule Read Free Page A

of fact, I don’t come cheap either. But professional criminals like Corradi are prudent men—they have to be. I’m confident the legal fund he has set aside for just such eventualities as these will cover our fees.’
    â€˜Whose idea was it to come to me? Yours or your client’s?’
    â€˜It was my idea.’
    â€˜And what did he say?’
    â€˜Just that he trusted my judgment.’ Bonotto picked up his cell phone from the bar and left.
    Virna came and sat at my table. ‘New job?’ she asked.
    â€˜Could be,’ I said. ‘You’re tired,’ I added, looking at her face.
    She smiled. ‘Not too tired to ask you back to my place when the club closes.’
    I smiled back. ‘Okay.’
    â€˜So don’t overdo the drink,’ she said, heading back to wait at the tables.
    Virna was my girl. Her real name was Giovanna but, owing to a passing resemblance to Virna Lisi in a famous toothpaste ad, everybody called her Virna. She was forty and had the charged expression and abrupt manner of someone whose life had not been easy. I liked her a lot. She loved me. All in all, we got along fine, even if she was a little too keen to organize my life and stop me drinking.
    I got to know her when she first came to work at the club as a waitress. Like everybody else, she thought the joint belonged to Rudy Scanferla, the barman, whereas in fact it was mine. Rudy had kindly agreed to manage it for the sake of our long friendship, not to mention the excellent wages I paid him. It was a few kilometers outside Padova in a small town that, like so many others, had sprung up thirty years earlier along the main road and was now basking in north-eastern Italy’s economic miracle.
    The club opened at eight in the evening and closed at four in the morning. Customers called it La Cuccia. It was warm, welcoming and discreet: a good place to sit, drink, chew the fat and hear good music–blues, mainly, my favorite kind of music. Not long ago, a singer, Eloisa Deriu, had turned up with a voice that could range from operatic arias to blues and jazz, and who had so much talent that somehow I never found the courage to tell her that before she came along nothing but blues had ever been heard at La Cuccia. I too had once been a singer, though not in Eloisa’s league. But I had taken to heart the old saying that ‘you can take the blues out of alcohol but you can’t take alcohol out of the blues’ and I would get up on stage with a few drinks inside me, and my voice would ring out as warm and moist as marsh mist. My group was called the Old Red Alligators and we even had a fan club. In fact it was my admirers who gave me the nickname Alligator. Those had been good times. But then I wound up in prison and by the time I got out my voice had dried up. After seven years of silence, all that was left was my nickname and a longing to listen. In prison I had become a skillful peacemaker, moving easily between the various criminal gangs. So when I got out I started working for lawyers who needed an entrée into organized crime to get their clients out of trouble.
    I had two associates. Beniamino Rossini, also known as Old Rossini to distinguish him from his many brothers, was one of the few surviving members of the old-style criminal underworld. His mother, of Basque descent, had been a legendary smuggler and Rossini had started out, no more than a kid, helping her to move contraband goods over the Swiss border. Later he specialized in multi-million dollar robberies. His last big job had gone wrong, and the two of us had met up in prison, where I had had the pleasure of helping him out of a delicate situation involving a group of Neapolitan Camorristi.
    Now Rossini was rich, fiftyish, and lived in a house by the sea at Punta Sabbioni, where he devoted his energies to smuggling goods from nearby Dalmatia: weapons, gold, caviar, girls, and people in trouble with the law. There was