“I’ve been thinking about the job,” Aldo said.
Zozo laughed, one note, a kind of amused grunt. “And you have questions, correct?”
“Sì.”
“Take my advice: don’t ask them.”
“Sì, certo. Fine.”
Zozo ran his eyes around the room. “My suspicion,” he said, “is that no woman has put her foot in this place in the past century.”
Aldo forced a smile, waited, watched. If Zozo had come to kill him, there was no use in trying to escape. Escape where? Out the front door into a part of the city that, even with the German presence, the man basically controlled? The Germans only seemed to run things. They did, in fact, have power in a certain way. They could stop you on the street, arrest you, bring you to the torture cells, kill you for no reason. But their authority was like a heavy gray quilt over a mattress covered with a thousand spiders, each with its own web and territory. With the quilt over both of them now, the most powerful spider of all was sitting in the chair opposite him, holding the glass of beer loosely between thumb and forefinger and keeping on his face an expression that no one on earth could read. Amusement? Stealth? Fury? No one could read it. “You have your Rita,” Zozo said.
Aldo nodded, only partly surprised. He’d never mentioned his visits to Rita, not to anyone. The big spider’s associates had followed him, checked on him, made sure Aldo Pastone wasn’t working for the Fascists or the Nazis or one of the other families, then made their report.
“And your beautiful daughter.”
Another nod, a stiffening.
“Who we watch out for always.”
“That matters to me.”
“I imagine it does.” Zozo drained the glass in a single long gulp and set it on the marble-topped side table to his left. “Someone is following her. A German soldier. Did you know? Lo zoppo, we call him. The lame one.”
“I’ve seen him.”
“And wanted to kill him, no doubt.”
“Right.”
“For the things he’s done bothering Italian women, your daughter and others, he should be killed. He’s a would-be rapist, a snake. Perhaps soon some unpleasant fate will befall him.”
At the word rapist, the ugliest of words—strupratore—Aldo felt the skin on the backs of his shoulders rippling. At the same time, he realized the true purpose of the visit: Zozo was about to recruit him to become an assassin, using the safety of his own daughter as leverage.
“He follows your Lucia about the city as if he has no other job.”
Aldo sat still, watching, waiting for the order.
Zozo sighed, shifted his weight in the chair, started to say something, stopped himself, moved on to another subject. “People have had enough,” he said. “Things are changing now in the city.”
“In the country,” Aldo ventured.
“Sì, sì, certo. First we are fighting against the Allies. Now we are fighting with them. Our duce, our king . . .” He waved a hand as if the two men operated on another planet, which, in a sense, they did. His eyes closed another fraction. “They pretend to rule us but serve only themselves. What we have is our family, our city, those close to us. The rest is illusion, a mirage of power, am I correct?”
Aldo nodded.
“When the war is over,” Zozo went on, “we’ll have our city again. It will be completely ours. And the Hitlers and Mussolinis and Roosevelts and Churchills and Stalins will have”—another wave of the hand—“un vuoto. An emptiness. If they’re even still alive.”
“I was sorry about your brother. He was kind to me.”
“Kind to many people, yes. And not so kind to others. You had his respect.”
When Zozo paused again, hands on the tops of his thighs now, it occurred to Aldo that the conversation must be a test. The Camorra was loyal to one thing: the Camorra. If the Fascists enabled them to make money, then they supported, or at least tolerated, the Fascists. If the Allies were good for business, they backed the Allies. It occurred to him that, at some point, Zozo might have taken sides, might have become, for mysterious reasons, a supporter of Mussolini and his Blackshirts. Mussolini was gone now, but the Blackshirts remained, the OVRA remained, the spies, the ambitious bureaucrats, Fascists who would torture fellow Italians by forcing them to drink castor oil, shit their pants in public, and die of dehydration. They remained, and perhaps they were thinking that power awaited them again, in another form, once the Germans disappeared and the Allies had come and gone. Maybe they were intent on purging the city of any potential resistance, and Zozo was here to find out how his employee felt about Mussolini’s departure, and where he would stand when the air cleared again and business flourished. Maybe the mention of his daughter was a veiled threat: stand with us or we’ll ruin her, carry her off in a car and ruin her forever.
He’d heard the stories.
“You had my brother’s respect,” Zozo repeated. He drew the pistol out of the holster, tilted it this way and that in his hand for a few seconds, then reached it across the small space between them, handle first. “Loaded,” he said. “You know how to use it?”
Aldo nodded.
“The clip has six rounds. We’ll get you more.”
“Fine.”
Zozo pushed his weight to the edge of the chair as if to stand, then hesitated, palms on knees. He lifted his eyes and met Aldo’s, and some of the pleasant disguise fell away. “It’s a good thing to have a weapon now. There has been a series of . . . incidents in various parts of the city. Have you heard?”
“Yes, rumors anyway.”
“Facts,” Zozo corrected. “Some of our Nazi friends have met a sudden end of life. Which opens up for us certain opportunities. Tonight, the Dell’Acquas will come by here and pick you up in a car. The car has a large trunk. They will take you out the Avellino road, and there will be a German vehicle disabled on that road, at the thirty-two-kilometer mark. There won’t be any soldiers guarding it. It will be disabled, abandoned. Your task will be to strip it as quickly as you can of anything that seems of value, anything you can fit into the trunk of the car. Weapons are first priority, understood?”
Aldo nodded.
“Don’t put them in the back seat but in the trunk. Take a man you trust, if you want to, for companionship.” He laughed at his own joke. “Once you’ve cleaned out the car, they’ll drive you to a place near the church in Vasto. Do you know it? Near Corso Novara.”
Aldo nodded, watching, trying to see what was behind the plan.
“That’s all. And here . . .” Zozo fished into the inside pocket of his jacket, brought out a folded envelope, and set it on the table. “A first payment. We all have to eat.”
Aldo nodded his thanks. Zozo stood and went to the door, opened it himself, and left without looking back, without a handshake or a goodbye. Aldo closed the door, waited a moment, then lifted the flap on the envelope and thumbed through the bills there. Four fifty-lire notes. Enough to feed him and Lucia for weeks. He lifted the pistol from the table, gingerly, and checked to see that it did, in fact, have a magazine with bullets in it. His mind was working and working, running through a dozen possibilities that might warrant such a generous payment. The Dell’Acqua boys would take him out on the Avellino road in darkness. He’d strip a German jeep that would have been abandoned at precisely the thirty-two-kilometer mark, carry back the contraband in the trunk of a car. Weapons especially. Bring the car to the Vasto.