All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2009 Akashic Books
©2009 Carlo Lucarelli for the story “Beret” (titled “Mephisto” in its original Italian form), published by arrangement with Roberto Santachiara at Agenzia Letteraria.
Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple
Rome map by Sohrab Habibion
eISBN: 978-1-617-75164-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-64-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008925936
All rights reserved
Second printing
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ALSO IN THE AKASHIC BOOKS NOIR SERIES
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BARCELONA NOIR (SPAIN), edited by ADRIANA V. LÓPEZ & CARMEN OSPINA
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BRONX NOIR, edited by S.J. ROZAN
BROOKLYN NOIR, edited by TIM McLOUGHLIN
BROOKLYN NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS, edited by TIM McLOUGHLIN
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART I: WALLS & STONES
NICOLETTA VALLORANI
Piazza dei Cinquecento
Pasolini’s Shadow
ANTONIO SCURATI
Colosseum
Eternal Rome
TOMMASO PINCIO
Via Veneto
The Melting Pot
CRISTIANA DANILA FORMETTA
Ostia
Last Summer Together
PART II: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CAESAR
DIEGO DE SILVA
Fiumicino
Don’t Talk to the Passenger
ENRICO FRANCESCHINI
Villa Borghese
Roman Holidays
FRANCESCA MAZZUCATO
Tiburtina Station
Tiburtina Noir Blues
MARCELLO FOIS
Via Marco Aurelio
Words, Thoughts
PART III: PASTA, WINE & BULLETS
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO
Stazione Termini
Christmas Eves
CARLO LUCARELLI
Vicolo del Bologna
Beret
MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI
Calcata
Remember Me with Kindness
EVELINA SANTANGELO
Via Ascoli Piceno
Eaten Alive
PART IV: LA DOLCE VITA
ANTONIO PASCALE
Quartiere Pigneto
For a Few More Gold Tokens
BOOSTA
Tangenziale
Silence Is Golden
GIUSEPPE GENNA
Montecitorio
Caput Mundi
NICOLA LAGIOIA
Via Appia Antica
1988
About the Contributors
INTRODUCTION
CRADLE OR GRAVE?
Well, something of both.
The flocks of tourists who visit the city today see the obvious monuments to a lost age, the innumerable churches, the fashionable shops, the Colosseum, the Via Veneto, the Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps, and the quietly coursing Tiber River that bisects the city. They line up single file for hours on end to enter the Vatican, and i
t must all feel—at least to the more cinematically literate of them—like stepping into a Federico Fellini movie. They walk around, awed by the timeless majesty of the old stones, walls, and busy streets; they enjoy wonderful food, take countless photographs, and retreat with tired souls and feet to their hotel rooms or pensiones, and then all too quickly it’s time to go home and leave the splendor of Rome behind.
But how much have they really seen of the city, the dimension in which actual contemporary Romans live? Unless they have a solid acquaintance with resident Italians and are invited into their homes and shown what lies beyond the shiny façade of postcard Rome, they have in fact barely skimmed the surface of this complex city.
The same applies, of course, to many cities, and it’s often only through living in their midst for a substantial period of time that one begins to really “know” a place, to understand its often shocking intimacies.
According to the legend, Rome owes its origins to a murder—when one brother killed another in order to grab the crown. Since then, there has been a dark tapestry of misdeeds, plots, and assassinations alongside some of the cruelest crimes in the history of mankind, beginning with Nero and Caligula, all through myriad bloody Vatican intrigues, wars by the handful, urban terrorism, and the arcane modern collusions between politics and the Mafia.
For some of us walking through the city today, despite the incessant roar of traffic (echoed by so many of the stories in this collection), our imaginations evoke the old Roman Empire (helped in one way or another by images and memories of films and TV shows recreating the glory, the togas, and the slum-level sordidness of antiquity); we dream of the legions marching up the Via Appia back from so many wars, Romulus and Remus and the surrounding hills (which are not always so visible these days if you are staying in the heart of town), the ruthless cruelty of Caesar and Caligula and so many other fabled emperors and dignitaries. Or, if your mind is set to different eras, you may think of the Borgias, or the decadent as well as earnest popes in situations so full of pomp and circumstance, or then again the more recent shadow of Mussolini’s fascists and their relentless program of monument building which still leaves its mark on the city. The possibilities are endless.
But for Romans it’s just another city, the one they live in, where the past is often of little consequence. A city for today, affected by globalization, the ever-shifting Italian rigmarole of politics, a harbor of coffee bars, trattorias, golden youth on motorbikes, a city both old and young. A capital strongly marked by the shadow of today’s waves of illegal immigration and social injustice which color so many of our writers’ sometimes bleak and shocking stories.
The contrast in the stories we have collected is between the glories of the past and a mainly dark and often pessimistic view of the present, in which the frailties of human nature are pronounced. Many of these writers are struck by the poverty that afflicts the lower classes in Rome, gypsies and unwelcome immigrants from poorer countries who congregate here, and this is expressed through the eyes of both visitors to the city and Romans themselves. Through it all looms the crumbling majesty of the Colosseum, the very heartbeat of Rome, which acts as a leitmotif from story to story, alongside the tales of tender and fierce love that this unforgettable capital acts as a background for.
Our writers’ inspiration comes from the walls and streets of Rome, representing the crème de la crème of Italian mystery and mainstream writing, and many of them are permanent residents of the Italian best-seller lists. Umberto Eco recently wrote that “noir literature is a mirror for the state of literature in any given country.” This anthology is, we believe, a strong reflection of the health of Italian writing.
Italian crime writing has always bathed in a sea of social realism, but curiously enough, few major writers in the genre have actually been Roman or written about this place. Turin, Milan, and Bologna, as well as the inevitable Mafia-drenched atmospheres of Sardinia, Naples, and Sicily, have long proven fertile ground for the pens of local crime and mystery writers. There have, naturally, been worthy exceptions, such as the recent success (as both a book and later a powerful movie) of Giancarlo De Cataldo’s Romanzo Criminale, a saga of Roman misfits and criminals that spans several decades. But Italian crime writing has often found its poles of attraction elsewhere, what with Giorgio Scerbanenco’s doughty Milan cops, the Turin and Bologna schools of mystery writing, respectively exemplified by Andrea G. Pinketts and Carlo Lucarelli, and Andrea Camilleri’s strongly ironic view of Sicilian mores.
Which is why several writers were puzzled when we approached them for new stories set in Italy’s capital city.
Should they move one of their characters there? some asked.
Should they write about the Rome a few of them did not know intimately, or should they just write their dream of Rome?
We gave them carte blanche and we think the results speak for themselves. The tales you are about to read are varied, both harsh and funny, poignant and gripping. There is an undeniable renaissance of crime and mystery writing in Italy right now, and we could have invited yet a further fifteen or so additional authors to contribute to this collection if we had enough space; we are confident the ensuing stories would have been as strong as the ones in the following pages.
A handful of the writers who embarked on this adventure have had books already translated into English, while others have not. We hope more of them will find a home in America and Britain as a result of their appearance here.
And next time you are visiting Italy, enjoy your tourist pursuits but on occasion pause for a moment and try and see what lies beyond the corner of the alley or street you are walking down, or attempt to imagine what might be happening beyond those closed curtains you are passing. But until then, let your imagination take a dip into Rome Noir, and travel the city from its trunk roads to its highways, past the notorious Stazione Termini and the shadow of the iconic Colosseum, and through both the fashionable and sometimes undesirable areas that have inspired our writers.
Grazie mille and ciao.
Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski
Rome, Italy
November 2008
PART I
WALLS & STONES
PASOLINI’S SHADOW
NICOLETTA VALLORANI
Piazza dei Cinquecento
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.
—P. P. Pasolini
We all drift silently in a world of shadows.
The right night, a place I know. The station hunkers in the heart of this city.
Without a history.
We are all without a history, because we are overwhelmed by it. By the lack of reason, in a civil society that is breaking up, forgetting everything.
The Romans were builders of roads. I, who am a foreigner, travel them. I seek a familiarity that I will not find, I already know that, but it is enough for me to seek it: It is an uncodified move, a journey with eyes wide open. Rome is a body whose strong legs and dirty feet are known to me, hands quick to steal money from your pockets, hired sex, soft, dark hair, muscles that slither, breath that stinks of cigarette smoke and cheap liquor.
Roads. The houses like people: They have a worn, dusty nobility, in this Rome, that yields to time unsparingly. And time, silently, crumbles bricks, molds pavement, brushes bodies with the same gentle, profound caress that I would like to have or experience.
Roads. A troublesome object that I do not see on the asphalt, and the car jerks. A tire absorbs the jolt, smashing what lies beneath it and continuing on its way: maybe a small life has ended, perhaps only a shattered object. At the end of life, the two are equivalent.
Roads. Where I ran as a child there was dirt and grass. I splashed about up to my knees, happy. That time is gone.
Roads. The Romans were builders of roads, but that time is gone as well.
Piazza dei Cinquecento,
legs spread, lies there waiting. The fools, those who can’t see, think they can rape her, possess her. But in this dark, nocturnal cavity they are lost, devoured, chewed up and spit out as small white bones. I, on the other hand, know. I know the secret, and will not get lost.
The station is a door: From there you go or return.
The station is a lady covered in rags, with garbage for jewels. She laughs, deceptively indulgent and defenseless, hiding the gnashing of her teeth behind the trains’ clatter. She whispers promises she will not keep, but she is always a mystery because men believe in lies and let themselves be lulled by them. Rome knows all secrets, protects all sins. It is a museum of sorrow and shame, where the executioner laughs at the victim whose head he is preparing to lop off, with no remorse whatsoever and with unbounded craving.
The little garden is a place of bones. It is a city of secrets, catacombs, buried memories replaced by artfully constructed recollections. But here, in the little bone garden, it is impossible to lie. There are places where the city reveals itself. It can do so because nobody really looks, no one sees anything except what he wants to see.
But I know.
I am aware of the fraud. I revealed the secret. Still, I am not a danger, since no one will believe me. Rome can do this: display the truth, make it her whore, and sell it to the highest bidder.
Ghosts crouch in the little bone garden.
We all drift along, silent, alone.
It’s like a breath I’m lacking, that I continue to look for, driving around aimlessly, with eyes that see in the dark, matching profiles and desires. Desire fulfilled is a simulated death. And like every death, it examines the meaning of life retrospectively, transforming it into myth. Desire is the articulation of a solitude from which I will not emerge, except at the instant of an embrace. A moment, a caress, a body that responds like an object, in the unreasoning workings of sensation.