The Fallen Angel

SIX

Bedir Cakici was alone, bored, hungry and down to his last stick of gum. He’d been sitting in the immigration police’s interview room for four hours. It was a small, windowless cubicle with noisy air conditioning that didn’t work. The place was as hot as an oven and stank from the cooking fat of some nearby canteen drifting in from the single vent.

He shook his handcuffs and wondered again when there might be some avenue of escape. From here it was impossible. But they’d been making noises about the police wanting him, about a move to the city Questura. If he could make a phone call, get the right guy. If the men he knew were willing to take a couple of risks to spring an old friend from some sleepy cop car as it tracked down the Via Appia Nuova. Then he could do the smart thing, hide out for a while, work his way to the Adriatic, get across in one of the smuggling speedboats that brought in contraband tobacco from Croatia.

If, if, if.

He couldn’t believe they’d stopped him. Or that he’d been dumb enough to use one of the oldest fake passports he carried. Life had been a little hectic since Tuesday evening. Now he was paying the price.

One of the immigration officers, a man who looked like a prissy schoolteacher, walked back in followed by a couple of surly-looking individuals in shapeless suits who announced themselves as state police. He believed this. They had that nasty, suspicious look about them. Nevertheless they were the oddest couple of cops he’d seen in a while, one youngish, slim, good-looking with features that seemed as if they ought to be pleasant, smiling, but weren’t. He had dark hair and the kind of stance the Turk associated with sportsmen, football players and the like. The older one was tall, heavily built and ugly, a scary individual with a battered face that might have been through a windscreen once or twice. Yet the tough guy seemed strangely deferential around the younger man, as if he were the boss, not the other way round, as Cakici could have expected.

They didn’t show ID. They just yawned, pulled up a couple of chairs at the table, then stared at the immigration officer.

‘You want me to stay?’ the man asked. ‘I’m supposed to stay. That’s what the rules say.’

The big ugly one had his huge hands behind his balding head and was giving him a very nasty look.

‘I mean, I think that’s what the rules say,’ the immigration man added.

‘Sir?’ the big one asked the cop with him.

Sir? Cakici thought.

‘No, we don’t,’ the younger officer told him. ‘Isn’t it your lunch time or something?’

The immigration man left, mumbling under his breath.

The one who’d ordered him out waited, then got up and walked round the room, examining things, ignoring Cakici entirely.

‘There’s a microphone here, sir,’ the big cop said, pointing at a little plastic stick in the middle of the table.

‘I don’t think we need that, do we?’

The big guy reached over with one huge arm and ripped the mike out of its housing, wrapped the cable round the body, then threw the thing into the corner of the room.

The other had stopped in front of a video camera lens set high on the wall above the table.

He turned, still ignoring the Turk, and asked the old cop, ‘Am I imagining this or is it chewing gum?’

Cakici’s head came up from the table. This had been a bad day. He deserved a little respect. He didn’t like being referred to as ‘it’.

The huge one stared at him, as if examining some foreign object, and said, ‘It is. Unbelievable.’

‘It? It?’ Cakici kept on chewing, all through his outrage. ‘What am I? An animal or something? How about some courtesy around here? I got a name.’

The young cop came and sat down. So the Turk had the big guy on his left and the shorter one on the other side, which didn’t feel good.

‘What name? Mickey Mouse?’

‘Minnie more like,’ the big one grumbled, staring at his pale linen designer suit.

‘Real Armani, muttonhead,’ Cakici told him, trying to stab a finger across the table, not that the cuffs let him do it properly. ‘Guess you can’t buy that on your wages.’

They went very quiet and then the young one said, ‘You’d be surprised what we could buy if we wanted.’

The big cop shook his head, as if this saddened him deeply.

‘I don’t know,’ he muttered in a quiet, mournful voice. ‘You get some dope dealer with a fake passport. It’s chewing gum. And it wants courtesy?’ He opened his hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘Sir. This is so. . unreasonable.’

The Turk sighed, struggled in the cuffs but finally managed to take out the gum, placed the damp lump on top of the shiny plastic table and began to say, ‘OK. Do not call me “it”. I got rights, I got. .’

He fell quiet. The young cop, the boss cop, had picked up the gum in his fingers, stared at it with an expression of disgust. Then, as Cakici watched, bemused, he walked over to the video camera and placed the grey blob on the lens, patting it until the gum extended across the whole of the round glass eye, blocking the camera’s view completely.

No mike. No video. This was an unusual interview.

The big guy yawned, pulled his chair up very close to Cakici, placed a gigantic arm around his shoulders and squeezed.

It was a bone-breaking hug and the cop smiled at him, quite affectionately it appeared, throughout. His breath smelled of mints.

The Turk was starting to sweat.

‘First impressions count, you know. The gum was a bad start,’ the cop told him. ‘My sovrintendente has never liked gum. It offends him.’

He squeezed harder. Cakici let out a little cry of pain and said, ‘I didn’t kill nobody. Honest, I didn’t. I was just going on holiday. There’s this girl. I didn’t want her to know. . Women. .’

The cop sighed, shook his head, removed his arm, shuffled the chair a short distance away and said, ‘It thinks we’re stupid now.’

The other one was patting his jacket absent-mindedly as if he’d lost something. The Turk watched, worried, unsure what to say.

‘I know I’ve got it somewhere,’ the young one said, still looking. ‘Oh, wait a minute.’

He reached into his side pocket and took out a black handgun, a Beretta 92. Cakici knew his firearms. He had one of these himself, in the little armoury he kept in a safe in the garage.

‘What is this?’ he asked, laughing nervously. ‘Some kind of a joke.’

The young one held the Beretta loosely, lazily in his right hand and leaned forward.

‘Are we laughing?’ he asked the other one. ‘Did I laugh once since I came into this room?’

‘No, sir, you didn’t-’ the big one began.

‘Shut up!’ Cakici screeched. ‘Cut this out. All this “sir”, and weird stuff. Gimme a little dignity, huh?’

They looked at each other then the boss cop asked, ‘Dignity? How much dignity did Gino Riggi get? Dead in the dirt in a back alley in Trastevere, outside some lowlife bar where you sold junk to kids?’

The big one let go with another deep and sorry sigh then shook his huge bald head again repeatedly.

‘Very little, it seems to me, sir,’ he said. He smiled again and came very close to Cakici. ‘And you know something? Gino was a nice guy. We liked him. We had beers with him. And pizza too. Pizza was Gino’s favourite. He never mentioned us?’

‘What? What?’

The gun waved at him lazily from across the table and the other cop asked, very slowly, ‘Did he ever mention us?’

‘Nic,’ the big one said, then pointed a finger at his own barrel chest. ‘Gianni. His best friends. Did he ever mention us?’

‘No,’ Cakici shrugged. ‘Why the hell should he?’

Nic waved the gun around as if it was a toy. Cakici couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.

‘Gino was a good man,’ the man said. ‘Loyal. Trustworthy. Discreet. He had respect. He knew his place.’

He looked at the one called Gianni.

‘I don’t know why we’re telling it this, do you? Something that chews gum when you walk into the room. Chews gum on public property.’

‘That’s terrible, sir. Shocking. It does not know how to behave.’

‘Stop calling me that!’ Cakici cried.

Gianni stroked his chin then, with his big right fist, he reached out and grabbed Cakici by the collar of his Armani jacket, dragging him close to that ugly, scarred face.

‘Let me say this slowly so that your stupid little brain can understand,’ the big cop intoned, one syllable at a time. ‘Gino was more than a friend. He was our colleague. Our employee, if you like. You know those big guys who stand over you? Who tell you what to do? When to speak? When to go for a piss and when to wait? The people you listen to ’cos things go bad if you don’t?’

Cakici was staring at the video camera lens covered in grey gum, as if that might help him.

‘I want those immigration guys in here,’ he muttered.

‘Lunch break,’ Gianni told him. ‘No planes coming in for another ninety minutes. Long lunch break. Quite some way from here. Ciampino’s a shitty little airport. Either empty or full, and right now it’s as empty as a church on Thursdays. This is a place for poor people and the poor just get poorer, don’t they? We never fly from here, do we, sir?’

‘Beneath us,’ the Nic character said.

‘I want the immigr-’

‘See,’ the big man continued, ignoring him, ‘we were to Gino what those guys were to you. Superior. Kings of our own little world, with Gino there like a little prince, doing as he’s told. And now he’s dead. And now. .’ He let go with a push. Cakici rocked back in his chair. ‘Here you are.’

‘It knows,’ Nic said.

‘I didn’t! Not about you! Not a damned thing.’

‘It knows now,’ the young one added.

Gianni picked up Cakici’s left hand and slapped his own face with it.

‘Sir,’ he said, in a hurt, young voice. ‘It hit me. The prisoner hit me. I think it may be violent and dangerous. It may be trying to escape. I’m scared.’

Across the table the young cop yawned and murmured, ‘That’s terrible.’

Cakici shielded his eyes, whimpering, ‘You can’t do this. You can’t. .’

‘Watch me,’ Nic said, then pointed the gun in his face and pulled the trigger.