“Excuse me?”
“He does that, the dirty fuck. He spits on the floor and I’m supposed to lick it up.”
“And do you?”
“No! And then he fucking beats me. The fuck!”
“Maybe I should go and have a word with him.”
A sliver of light entered her eyes, and she laughed, revealing a gap-toothed mouth. “Yeah, go on then, padre. Go in if you fancy a broken tooth; that’s his specialty.”
“I have some other business with him. Don’t worry about me,” said Michael, picking up the curtain and rigging it back onto the rail before he stepped in.
His eyes fell on a fat, beady-eyed gypsy woman behind the bar.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for someone called Sergio?”
She nodded. “Why you sorry?” Then added, “Sergio not here,” and pointed to a back door, whilst at the same time speaking a few words under her breath to a dark, sharp-chested youth of no more than seventeen, who ran off.
Michael sat down. The long-limbed woman came back in and sat down with him. He offered her a drink and she asked for a Cinzano with ice.
“What’s your name?”
“Call me Honey,” she said. “What kind of fucking priest are you, anyway? Did you bust out of a monastery?”
Michael downed his drink. “I’m the sort of priest who believes in doing whatever he likes.”
“What’s that, then? Girls or boys? Or either?”
“I like everything except what I don’t like and I don’t like anything. You understand?”
“You don’t make a lot of sense to me but I won’t hold it against you. One thing I know: if I just sit here I’ll get another hiding when he comes back.”
“Don’t worry; I’ll take care of it,” said Michael.
Again she laughed and again that little streak of light entered her eyes. “You’re crazy. You’re worse than my mother.”
“Your mother, what’s she got to do with it?” said Michael, realizing that this was the key to her.
“Yeah, my mother. Don’t you have a mother?” she said defensively. “Course you bloody do, everyone has a mother even if she’s dead.”
“Don’t worry; mine’s dead as well.”
The peace was shattered when a bunch of tracksuit street sharks piled in behind an acne-scarred Andalusian gypsy. The sharp-chested youth passed something across to the gypsy woman.
“I guess that older gypsy guy is Sergio, right?”
“He’s going to throw you out on your ass like he does with me,” said Honey.
“Oh, he’ll be all right once I’ve explained things to him,” said Michael, with an assurance that even he found perplexing.
The fat gypsy woman came up and wanted fifty euro for two drinks. Michael paid up without protesting, which seemed to impress her. Quickly she asked for another hundred, then hitched up her skirt and gave him a cellophane-wrapped package from somewhere among her underwear. He got out his cash-fat wallet and paid. As he did so, he noticed Sergio sitting on a stool keeping his eyes on him before coming over. (Why is it that robbers always feel they have to start a conversation before they get to work?) Michael pre-empted him, walked up to him and grabbed his arm and muttered into his ear: “I’ve come for the Beretta.”
Sergio reluctantly took his eyes off the pocket where Michael had put his wallet.
“Why you did not say?”
“Sergio, I could ask you things too. Why you don’t do something useful with your miserable life? Why you prefer walking around with a turd stuck up your ass? One of these days you’re going to shit yourself and then we’ll all know about it. You’ll stink to high heaven.”
Honey couldn’t believe her ears. Michael counted four missing teeth in her wide-open mouth. Nervously she began itching her arms, pulling up her sleeves and exposing countless track marks and infected hypodermic punctures.
For the sake of convenience Sergio decided to find the joke amusing. He roared with hoarse laughter, slapping his thighs. “Fucking God-man with no shit in your ass like a faggot, come back in an hour… I give you Beretta, okay.”
Michael located a cheap hotel nearby, where he left his high-density plastic suitcase padlocked to the balcony railing. His room overlooked a narrow section of street fronted by cut-price electrical stores. Tall African men in colorful clothes stood haggling on the pavements or walked about with cardboard boxes (televisions, for the most part) balancing on their heads.
When he opened a little cabinet above the mirror, it was full of used syringes. He didn’t have much time, just about enough to fix himself with one of his own needles and have some anchovy fillets on toasted bread and a glass of wine in a cavernous restaurant patrolled by gloomy waiters.
When he got back to Sergio’s bar, the curtain was still undulating lazily in the draught but the place was much too quiet. He stood for a moment, letting the maggots do their surveillance.
They were decidedly uneasy, and he was learning to listen to them.
Just as he was about to step inside, he registered a movement in the window. The gypsy woman was crouching behind the aluminum-topped counter. Shielding his face with his forearm, he parted the curtain and stepped over the threshold directly into the path of a swinging baseball bat. His maggot arm bent out of shape from the impact, but with his other hand he lashed out, grabbed Sergio by the larynx and propelled him very hard into the concrete wall. His face made a nasty crunching sound as the bone and gristle separated. At the same time Michael felt a knife stabbing into his body from behind. The blade went in more or less directly where his kidney would have been, killing a good few maggots as it did so. Michael reacted instantaneously — or, more accurately, the maggots reacted.
He spun around and looked into the twisted face of one of Sergio’s men who thought the job was done, but in a flash Michael had wrenched the knife out of his grip and opened up the brute’s arm like a fish gut. Remotely, as if through a pair of broken headphones, he heard the poor man shrieking.
Sergio was squatting against the wall, pointing his flattened nose at the ceiling to stop any more shedding of blood over his dirty shell suit. His face had already ballooned. Michael could just about see the gypsy barmaid’s head behind the bar, where she was sitting on a low stool presumably kept there for occasions such as this.
“While I’m waiting for my Beretta, I’ll have a large whiskey, if you please Signora.” Without getting up, her fat arm put a glass and bottle on the counter. Michael did his own honors and helped himself to a cigarette from an abandoned pack.
Ten minutes later the Beretta arrived.
“Take it, padre,” said Sergio with self-righteous indignation. “If you come here again, I shoot you in the head.”
“Are you crazy, attacking an honest man of the cloth?” said Michael. “Can you really look me in the eye and tell me this was not deserved? You want to go to prison? You want your ugly faces splashed across the national newspapers, you stupid pork-eating slugs? How much beer do you get through every day, how many cigarettes? Lose your fucking spare tires before your hearts give up. Go home to your women and children, if you have them. Take a look at yourselves — do something with your lives before it’s too late!”
Sergio, looking to reassert some authority, barked at Honey. “You! Get me fried chicken!”
Michael took her arm. “Sorry. She’s coming with me.”
Sergio sniggered even as he winced: “I don’t care. Take her, she almost dead and you almost dead too. If you come back here you dead, and if you not come back here you also dead. I am not a crazy. But I know you are a crazy, because you love a stupid bitch like she. Goodbye…”