Senza Fine, parts I-IV
Mar. 12th, 2007 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaI plan on finishing this fic this month, so I may as well start posting it in an official capacity; it's not going to fit into one LJ entry anyway. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.
(You all know the drill but) JoJo part 5 post-series fic, Giorno/Mista, implied Bruno/Trish. Nuclear plot and character spoilers for everything up to volume 63 - that includes parts 3 and 4. I suspect/hope this reads differently in one go as opposed to serialized bits, but who knows. XD
Senza Fine
He dreams the butterfly, the butterfly dreams him,
And all three of us are just a dream of me!
—Szabó Lőrinc (translated by Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer)
I.
After things blew over Mista went around with Giorno taking care of unfinished business the others had left behind: flats and possessions, mostly. Giorno hadn't even known where they'd lived.
They'd all been within a few paces from each other. Fugo above the cafe down the street from Mista (who naturally took himself as the reference point), Buccellati two house numbers over and across, Narancia downstairs from Buccellati. Abbacchio a three-minute walk and seven flights of stairs up. They started there, going west to east, and had to ring the landlord each time because Buccellati didn't have the keys and no one had thought to search the others.
Abbacchio had a closet full of clothes, an Alessi coffeemaker, about a hundred alphabetized CDs (ninety-eight of which were classical and two of which were Duran Duran's Greatest Hits) and no furniture apart from the bed. The place could have been warehouse storage for all that it felt lived-in. But it smelt like Abbacchio, which was a shock. Prior to that day Mista couldn't have said Abbacchio had had a distinctive scent or worn aftershave, though logic suggested he must have. He stared at the CD rack and turned the thought over as Giorno went methodically through all the coats, checking pockets.
"What do we do with it?" he asked, after a while. Giorno shrugged but looked thoughtful.
"Keep what you want," he said. "Give away the rest – people always need things. But don't worry too much about space."
Mista couldn't tell if he'd found what he'd been looking for.
Fugo's landlord peered at them as if he were counting heads, then wanted to know if Fugo was still alive. When told he was (probably) but wouldn't be coming back (just as probably) his lips thinned as if he understood what had happened – as much as Mista did anyway; after they broke out of Venice Buccellati had said they were square with Fugo, no hard feelings, and Mista was glad of it because whatever Buccellati said had to be true – then he asked for Fugo's rent for the month, which apparently had come due on the first. Mista started to remind him of the custom the cafe had had from all five of them over the years, but when he got to the word "protection" Giorno waved him off and wrote a check.
When they went up they realised Fugo had been back, and had taken with him anything he was unwilling or thought unwise to abandon, if the discrete gaps on the bookshelves were any indication. The rest was just more stuff.
They had the keys to Buccellati's but the landlady came out when she heard them on the stairs, thinking they were Buccellati, so Giorno had to open while Mista comforted her and she sobbed spasmodically into a handkerchief. Finally he took her downstairs with her leaning heavily on his arm for purchase – her legs had been swollen for months and the poultices weren't helping, even her doctor was tired of seeing her but Buccellati had always asked how she was and never showed a bit of impatience, that child had been too good for the world and she wasn't surprised, she knew God would take him home too soon – then she cried a while longer on his shoulder. Afterward she made him a cup of chamomile tea because he looked like he needed it.
Mista thought he did. Something about her kindness and garrulous grief called his own up from where it had been, if not forgotten, then unremembered: tucked away to make room for the day-to-day of a demanding present. His chest clenched, his eyes prickled and he had to keep himself from bawling then and there. Instead he drank the tea, though he would've preferred alcohol or coffee or anything that wasn't chamomile, and imposed on her fellow feeling for plastic trash bags.
Narancia's rooms resembled the wake of a particularly grubby and pungent cyclone – as of course they were, in a manner of speaking. No one could have accused Mista of fastidiousness but even he had avoided Narancia's place. He made piles of what seemed safe to touch, and was surprised to find after an hour of labour that he'd accumulated twenty consecutive volumes of Fist of the North Star and an astonishing thirty-three of Pink Dark Boy. Mista had always meant to borrow the series but had never gotten around to it. He swept most of the other manga (that he'd read) and CDs (that he'd cheerfully never hear again) into two trash bags, lugged them downstairs and dumped them by the front gate.
There were neighborhood kids hanging around and watching; there always were. Mista waved them over.
"All yours," he said. "Today's your lucky day. Don't let me hear you fighting."
Keep what you want and give away the rest. He left them at it and went upstairs to find Giorno.
Giorno was perched on the armrest of Buccellati's favorite chair, seemingly sunk in a brown study. It didn't look like he'd touched anything. The place was as neat and comfortable as when Mista had been there last, less than a month ago, and it too smelt like Buccellati: not dirty clothes or cologne, but something more indefinite and warm. It felt like Buccellati could walk back in the door at any moment.
Mista coughed, half to get Giorno's attention and half to clear the lump in his throat.
"Boss?"
Giorno shook himself visibly out of reverie. "Oh, it's you," he said. Then he slid off the armrest and went to check Buccellati's desk drawers, as if he'd been in suspended motion and Mista's return had set him off again.
They spent the rest of the afternoon going through Buccellati's papers, which were the most important part – or so Giorno said. There was one drawer with a false bottom that wouldn't come apart until Giorno pried it up with a vine, but underneath they only found another key. It was shaped for the front door of a house, not a car or safe or coin locker. They couldn't figure out what door it opened.
***
That evening Mista hauled fifty-three volumes of manga back to his flat, along with all the CDs and tapes he'd lent and lost to Narancia over the years. He dropped the trash bags on the floor and stretched out on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The window was half open, and the breeze after sunset was pleasant. He could hear the lady on the ground floor call her kid in to dinner, could smell the pasta sauce on her stove. The student in the bedsit under his was picking out the chords to "E la chiamano estate" on his guitar, badly. He was indefatigable. Mista had thought more than once of knocking on his door and roughing him up a little; nothing serious, just to put the fear of the Mafia's beauty sleep into him.
Everything was the same. Everything had changed.
Eventually he rolled over, picked out volume one of Pink Dark Boy and started to read.
II.
Pink Dark Boy, Mista decided, was basically the weirdest comic ever.
"Well, expand on that," said Giorno. "What's the plot?"
"Uh. Well, there's this kid – British kid, not Japanese, this is all set in the 1920s or something – who's about sixteen, and his grandfather dies and leaves him a fortune, so he decides to start a detective agency to look for this girl who – no wait, I've got the order wrong, first he finds this notebook in a hole in the wall behind his grandfather's portrait, and it turns out that there was this secret society in Moorish Spain that was supposed to guard – is this the place?"
"None other," said Giorno. He parallel parked the Spider Quadrifoglio perfectly, shifting gears twice. Mista couldn't figure out how he did it.
He tried carrying whichever volume he was currently on around with him but never found much of a chance to read. Bodyguarding was like sniping, which in itself was something Rigatoni had to teach him: if you weren't bored ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, you weren't paying the attention required to do the job right during the remaining zero point one percent. And Mista had to represent, being frequently outnumbered.
They stayed on the move, at first. Three days in this five-star hotel; five days in that high-rise flat; a week in the Tuscan countryside, in a mansion whose rusticity was a gloss over dazzling technological convenience. Mista was dimly aware that the financial arrangements and properties had belonged to Diavolo, who apparently had lived the same lifestyle of peripateic luxury, but they never found any signs of the former boss's passage. No possessions, no stains, no fingerprints. No further clues. It was as if by his death the man had ceased to exist entirely, going backward in time as well as forward. Or perhaps the cleaning staff was merely thorough as well as discreet.
During the day Mista paid visits with Giorno, or accompanied him to luncheons and gentlemen's clubs, or – less frequently – hung around while Giorno received visitors. It didn't do for him to physically attend most of these meetings, but as long as he had a chair by the door and Giorno was within a bullet's range he could listen in. When possible he made chitchat instead, by way of keeping his ear to the ground while Giorno handled the big cheese, but the other guy's people weren't always in the mood to talk.
Giorno mostly presented himself as the successor to Buccellati, himself Polpo's heir, and thus the operative in charge of Naples, her port and adjacent territories. Early on his control was largely nominal. The succession had been ratified by direct communication with key operatives in other cities (that is, by Giorno himself), but his status among the locals was much less clear-cut. Buccellati had been an unknown quantity to most and Giorno more so. There were rumours: the hunt had been on in Venice and only called off much later. Not everyone Giorno spoke to extended their support, and some retracted it. The first weeks were full of shakeups.
"This Andrea Cacciatore," Mista would say, "word is not a single fishing boat puts out of the harbour without his go-ahead. Buccellati used to say even Polpo watched his step when Cacciatore was in the picture. And you're going to let him walk out the door like that?"
"It was an illuminating conversation," Giorno said. "We'll see how things develop."
He said that kind of thing more and more often: we'll see. It was an interesting two hours. I learnt a lot from our talk. Wait. Wait and see.
Mista reckoned they weren't waiting as much as Giorno said they were.
The heart of it, he knew, was the laptop they'd retrieved from the Colosseum. The laptop contained all that had made Diavolo the head of their organization – or rather, all the information that had proven he was. Now that it was in Giorno's hands, Giorno was the de facto leader of Passione. On days without appointments he spent hours with Polnareff and occasionally Trish, going over the kind of spreadsheet data that made Mista's eyes lose focus. Words like "remote login" and "high-level encryption" were bandied about. By himself Giorno worked late into the night, the minute plastic click-clack of the keyboard continuous whenever Mista couldn't sleep and dropped in to see how he was doing. He was constantly emailing one operative or another, tracing their actions, retrieving records, disseminating information, erasing tracks. Pulling at threads and sending out feelers. Changing one truth for another. Learning.
Mista let himself be seen at selected usual haunts, told a few tall tales of their journey and listened to the stories he was told in return. Judge so-and-so in Rome had been caught in a police raid with his pants down and a twelve-year-old girl in the room, unluckily for the faction that ran the prostitution ring he was said to favour both in and out of court. Such-and-such an operative in Milan was getting out of narcotics and into real estate speculation – either way prices were going up. Passione had turned down a deal with the Ukrainians but the boss knew what he was doing. The boss had had Polpo assassinated himself and that was why no one knew who'd ordered the hit. The boss had survived an attempt on his life and was cleaning house, anyone who didn't have sense enough to keep his head down would have hell to pay going forward. A team of stand-using hitmen had gone rogue in Venice and the boss was in hiding, no one had heard from him in weeks. Somebody answered to someone who answered to someone else who'd received direct orders from the boss just the day before. The boss was flushing out rats. The boss didn't know his right hand from his left. The boss was dead and there was going to be a war. The boss was healthy and it was business as usual. The boss had been dead for a long time now and someone else was giving the orders, but don't quote him on it or he'll deny all and call you liar to your face.
Mista recounted the rumours verbatim to Giorno, who only smiled and told him to keep up the good work.
Mista had no knack for strategic planning that went beyond that day's dinner, but gut instinct told him the endgame: eventually Giorno would let it be known that the operative in charge of Naples was the same man who headed the entirety of Passione.
By the time he did, the revelation would no longer be cause for surprise.
III.
He still had to get his hands dirty from time to time. There were incidents, guarding Giorno, and the occasional job where it had to be clear who was giving the orders. On top of it all he had to accompany Trish when she went shopping. Mista would have taken a shootout over it any day.
"I don't get why I have to carry everything," he said. Trish looked at him as if he'd sprouted another pair of arms, which frankly would have come in handy.
"You're a man, aren't you?" she said. "That's what you're here for. It's not to give an expert opinion, that's for sure."
Mista had assumed he was there in case other parties in Passione put two and two together and got bright ideas involving the word "kidnapping" again, but when he thought about it he figured Trish could handle herself. Even if she were shot at the bullets would turn to putty on contact. It was as good as he could manage.
"Come on," said Trish, "don't look so tragic. I'll treat you to gelato after."
Trish didn't shop often, thankfully, but when she did she racked up bills like there was no tomorrow. Mista theoretically had access to an identical expense account – at least, the card Giorno had given him looked the same as the one he'd given Trish – but a shirt was a shirt as far as he was concerned. If you had twenty euros you could buy a shirt for twenty euros; if you had two thousand euros you could buy a shirt for two thousand euros. At the end of the day it was something to throw over your back so as not to leave the house naked.
Besides, he liked his normal clothes.
It was funny because Mista had always figured, heaps of cash, what's not to like? But when it came to it he barely felt any different. Still the same Guido Mista, princely surroundings or not, walking the streets of Old Napoli with an eye out for trouble and a gun down his pants. He didn't like to gamble, and there was only so much food and wine you could shove down your throat if you wanted to be on the ball the next morning. Which left – what?
Girls, purportedly. Or not.
"I'm a girl," said Trish. She had her chin propped on the back of her hand to indicate she was listening. Mista brightened.
"Go out with me? I could show you a good—"
"I'll pass, thanks."
It wasn't a gelateria the way Mista liked them, or tended to frequent them. They were on the mezzanine of a gleaming Milanese covered promenade, all designer boutiques in chrome and glass and pink marble, and the rest stops were decorated to match. The stools were shaped like cocktail glasses and the tables like fountain basins. To complete the image the Pistols had flocked like pigeons to the edge of his lemon ice, ducking and shoving, and #5 was dangerously close to falling in. Mista steadied him with the back of his wooden spoon. "Back off, guys," he hissed.
Trish was still watching him. "What about Giorno?" she asked.
"What about him?"
Trish gave him a look like she could tell what he was thinking and judged it to be retarded, but when he waited she didn't press the point. Instead she turned away and made swirls in her gelato with her spoon. Stracciatella, which matched the decor and her outfit. She was wearing black ankle boots and a white sundress with a black stripe along the bottom that turned into black butterflies halfway up, except after Mista had stared at it for a while it became a black sundress with a white stripe along the top that turned into white butterflies halfway down. From a non-expert perspective he thought she looked good.
It reminded him of something. At first he couldn't place it, and then – from one blink to the next – he could.
"Trish—"
But he didn't know how to broach the topic. What was there to say?
"Giorno says we're going back to Naples tomorrow," he finished, lamely. "You sure you're not going to need another suitcase for all this stuff?"
As soon as the words were out he nearly bit his tongue, because if she decided she did he'd be the one to lug it back to the hotel. But Trish only laughed.
"It always comes back to Giorno for you," she said. "doesn't it? How long have you been his bodyguard now?"
Mista blinked. "Erm," he said. He hadn't kept count. A month? Two? "Actually, now that you—"
"Three months or thereabouts," said Trish. "And I bet he never really asked you, did he? It just happened."
"I like him," Mista said, defensively. "I trust him." Shit, he added mentally, at least Giorno knows what he's doing. Mista would have been at sea long ago.
Trish gave him an odd, lopsided smile and went back to playing with her ice cream.
"You know," she said, "So do I. That's the thing. It's like he's the sun and – and other people are just planets. Before you know it you're going in circles."
Mista couldn't tell what she was getting at. He said nothing.
"Sometimes I wonder if anyone's ever helped him solve his problems," said Trish. "You know? I wonder how far he's planned ahead. I wonder if he tells us anything, really."
IV.
At dinnertime the next evening Giorno drove the Quadrifoglio through a wrought-iron gate that swung open on its own, and up a paved driveway lined with Lombardy poplars. He parked in the courtyard before the front steps and Mista got out, turtle tucked under his arm, glancing around him. The fountain at the head of the driveway was dry, exposing the basin and the statuary's rust-stained base, but the surrounding flowerbeds were well-tended and blooming. The air smelt of roses and sunset.
Lights were already on inside, inviting.
"We'll be staying here," said Giorno. "For a while."
***
Weeks afterward Mista learnt the name of the estate was – properly – Villa San Raffaele; but no one called it that. The gardeners (who constituted a small standing army) called it Villa delle Farfalle, or Villa Farfalla, apparently in reference to the design of a fountain somewhere out on the grounds.
Mista suggested they change the moniker to Villa delle Coccinelle, at which they stared at him blankly until he gave up.
He wasn't sure how old the building was, or if the paintings on the walls and ceilings were famous, or what the plump naked girls and pompously robed men they depicted were named. He was sure that the architect had fancied himself a funny guy. From the vantage of the enclosed inner courtyard the layout appeared symmetrical and obvious, but in practice the rooms were divided from and opened onto each other in such a bafflingly counterintuitive manner that for the first few days Mista was constantly stumbling into closets or out onto unexpected loggias or circling back to the same drawing room from where he'd started. His bedroom technically adjoined Giorno's suite, but more than once he found himself climbing the servants' stairs to Trish's rooms while trying to get there – on the other side of the piano nobile and a floor down.
Eventually he got used to the floor plan. But in that house Giorno grew increasingly elusive; even when he came and went in plain view he was soundless.
***
By coincidence (Mista assumed, since design was unlikely), something very like the Villa made its first appearance in volume 17 of Pink Dark Boy, only expanded immensely in size and transported to Istanbul. Its name was the Palace of the Butterflies.
Up to said arc the series had consisted mostly of short, self-contained mysteries, in which Pink Dark Boy derived ingenious solutions to puzzling and gruesome crimes (often committed in exotic settings) and encountered hints of overarcing plot, but with the introduction of the malevolent Dr. Andrea Fulhaber the overarcing plot took over. Supernatural events made a hash of the deductive method; the humour grew darker; battles turned increasingly bloody. By volume 18 the intrepid protagonist and several associates had pursued their nemesis deep into the bowels of his palatial lair, and the alchemical properties of the architecture were making themselves known. Mista chuckled as the heroes rushed up a flight of stairs only to find themselves transported to the lower landing again. Been there, done that.
"What's so funny?" said Giorno. Mista screamed, dropped the tankoubon in his lap, then dropped it a second time on the floor as he scrambled to his feet.
"Geez, Boss—"
Giorno smiled in apology and turned back to the window. He was sitting in the upholstered alcove with his back against the panelling, hugging one bent knee, the other foot dangling. The curtains were open. Even in indirect sunlight his hair was over-bright, like some Quattrocento icon adorned in gold leaf and powdered lapis lazuli. Colours too brilliant for realism.
He was less than three metres away. Surely he hadn't been there when Mista had walked into the room... had he?
Mista couldn't read anymore. He waited, shifting his weight from foot to foot, but Giorno didn't pursue the conversation. He didn't move either, which was weird. Giorno wasn't prone to aimless staring into the middle distance.
"...Anything on the schedule for today, Boss?"
There was a pause of several seconds. "No. No appointments. Why?"
Weirder and weirder. "Uh – no, I just wondered. Haven't seen you at all since last night, I thought you were working." Mista frowned in an effort of recollection. "You weren't even at breakfast."
"I was... having a talk with Polnareff."
"In the turtle?"
No answer. Mista peered at him. "You okay, Boss?"
"Mista," Giorno said, "do you believe in fate? No, that's a foolish question. I know you do. I mean to ask, have you ever taken a step back and seen it. Understood it. Every action and reaction, all the threads that have bound you since birth – since before your birth – that drew you to this particular place, this moment in time."
He didn't sound drunk, but this was Giorno. "Um," said Mista.
Giorno turned his head to meet Mista's gaze. "I'll provide an example," he said. "Can you tell me how you arrived where you are now? When did it start?"
Was it a trick question? "Uh, well, I guess you bought this house and—" No, that wasn't it. "After we took out the old boss—"
"Before that," said Giorno.
"......We got sent on a mission to guard Trish and had to fight like fifty assassins and then it turned out the lot of us were getting screwed over by management? Boss, I'm not sure I'm—"
"Go further back," said Giorno. "Deeper. Why did we get the assignment in the first place? How did it happen?"
Mista gave up. There had to be a point to the exercise: it was Giorno. "Well, Polpo offed himself out of the blue for some reason, or maybe somebody offed him, I don't know, but Buccellati knew where he kept his stash so we went and got hold of it before anyone else did and turned it over to the organization, and that's how we got the assignment. To prove that Buccellati was capable of handling himself as an operative. ...Right?"
"It was me," Giorno said. "I killed Polpo."
"Oh." Mista considered this. "Wait... you killed Polpo? Did Buccellati know?"
"No." Giorno swung his legs down off the alcove. "I never had a chance to tell him."
"Boss—"
"An innocent man died when I joined Passione," said Giorno. "You know what the test was. I held Polpo responsible for his murder. But because Polpo died, Buccellati became an operative; because Buccellati became an operative, we were assigned to protect Trish; and because we were sworn to protect Trish, we turned against Diavolo in Venice, long before we had intended or dreamt possible or indeed considered wise. Therefore, you are here because of my actions. Quod est demonstratum."
Mista opened his mouth to tell him that conclusion was foregone. The words didn't come out: Giorno had stepped into his personal space and planted his hands against the mantelpiece to either side, and leant forward, and suddenly he was very close and Mista was very trapped.
"Or, put another way," he said, "everything that happened is my fault. Isn't it?"
"Why would—" Mista's brain belatedly caught up. "Boss, you've got it wrong, I don't think you're..."
He stopped. Giorno's lips brushed his ear, a warm tickle of breath.
"Mista," he said, "I want you to fuck me. Right now."
That deadly perfect enunciation made everything sound like an order.
"Boss," Mista heard himself say, blankly. Giorno pulled back, a little, so he could look Mista in the eyes. His gaze was intent, lips slightly parted. Mista resisted the temptation to lean forward.
"I've always wanted to see what was under there," Giorno said. "May I?"
"Wha—"
Giorno reached up and pulled on the arrow tab of Mista's hat, firmly, as if he expected a bell to ring at the other end – twice. What transpired was that Mista's bullets came tumbling out into his hand, and some of them rolled off his palm before he could react. The Pistols darted out and made catches before they reached the floor.
"Mista," #1 scolded, "be careful!"
Giorno blinked twice, then began to laugh. He closed his hand into a fist around the remaining bullets and leant his head against Mista's shoulder. His hair smelt like flowers.
Thursday, Mista thought even as his hands came up of their own volition, of course it's a Thursday. If he had had a say in anything the days of the week would have followed the example of his stand, Thursday would have been Friday and Sunday would have been... something else, and future generations would have been grateful for his foresight.
[ Parts V-VII. ]
(You all know the drill but) JoJo part 5 post-series fic, Giorno/Mista, implied Bruno/Trish. Nuclear plot and character spoilers for everything up to volume 63 - that includes parts 3 and 4. I suspect/hope this reads differently in one go as opposed to serialized bits, but who knows. XD
Senza Fine
He dreams the butterfly, the butterfly dreams him,
And all three of us are just a dream of me!
—Szabó Lőrinc (translated by Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer)
I.
After things blew over Mista went around with Giorno taking care of unfinished business the others had left behind: flats and possessions, mostly. Giorno hadn't even known where they'd lived.
They'd all been within a few paces from each other. Fugo above the cafe down the street from Mista (who naturally took himself as the reference point), Buccellati two house numbers over and across, Narancia downstairs from Buccellati. Abbacchio a three-minute walk and seven flights of stairs up. They started there, going west to east, and had to ring the landlord each time because Buccellati didn't have the keys and no one had thought to search the others.
Abbacchio had a closet full of clothes, an Alessi coffeemaker, about a hundred alphabetized CDs (ninety-eight of which were classical and two of which were Duran Duran's Greatest Hits) and no furniture apart from the bed. The place could have been warehouse storage for all that it felt lived-in. But it smelt like Abbacchio, which was a shock. Prior to that day Mista couldn't have said Abbacchio had had a distinctive scent or worn aftershave, though logic suggested he must have. He stared at the CD rack and turned the thought over as Giorno went methodically through all the coats, checking pockets.
"What do we do with it?" he asked, after a while. Giorno shrugged but looked thoughtful.
"Keep what you want," he said. "Give away the rest – people always need things. But don't worry too much about space."
Mista couldn't tell if he'd found what he'd been looking for.
Fugo's landlord peered at them as if he were counting heads, then wanted to know if Fugo was still alive. When told he was (probably) but wouldn't be coming back (just as probably) his lips thinned as if he understood what had happened – as much as Mista did anyway; after they broke out of Venice Buccellati had said they were square with Fugo, no hard feelings, and Mista was glad of it because whatever Buccellati said had to be true – then he asked for Fugo's rent for the month, which apparently had come due on the first. Mista started to remind him of the custom the cafe had had from all five of them over the years, but when he got to the word "protection" Giorno waved him off and wrote a check.
When they went up they realised Fugo had been back, and had taken with him anything he was unwilling or thought unwise to abandon, if the discrete gaps on the bookshelves were any indication. The rest was just more stuff.
They had the keys to Buccellati's but the landlady came out when she heard them on the stairs, thinking they were Buccellati, so Giorno had to open while Mista comforted her and she sobbed spasmodically into a handkerchief. Finally he took her downstairs with her leaning heavily on his arm for purchase – her legs had been swollen for months and the poultices weren't helping, even her doctor was tired of seeing her but Buccellati had always asked how she was and never showed a bit of impatience, that child had been too good for the world and she wasn't surprised, she knew God would take him home too soon – then she cried a while longer on his shoulder. Afterward she made him a cup of chamomile tea because he looked like he needed it.
Mista thought he did. Something about her kindness and garrulous grief called his own up from where it had been, if not forgotten, then unremembered: tucked away to make room for the day-to-day of a demanding present. His chest clenched, his eyes prickled and he had to keep himself from bawling then and there. Instead he drank the tea, though he would've preferred alcohol or coffee or anything that wasn't chamomile, and imposed on her fellow feeling for plastic trash bags.
Narancia's rooms resembled the wake of a particularly grubby and pungent cyclone – as of course they were, in a manner of speaking. No one could have accused Mista of fastidiousness but even he had avoided Narancia's place. He made piles of what seemed safe to touch, and was surprised to find after an hour of labour that he'd accumulated twenty consecutive volumes of Fist of the North Star and an astonishing thirty-three of Pink Dark Boy. Mista had always meant to borrow the series but had never gotten around to it. He swept most of the other manga (that he'd read) and CDs (that he'd cheerfully never hear again) into two trash bags, lugged them downstairs and dumped them by the front gate.
There were neighborhood kids hanging around and watching; there always were. Mista waved them over.
"All yours," he said. "Today's your lucky day. Don't let me hear you fighting."
Keep what you want and give away the rest. He left them at it and went upstairs to find Giorno.
Giorno was perched on the armrest of Buccellati's favorite chair, seemingly sunk in a brown study. It didn't look like he'd touched anything. The place was as neat and comfortable as when Mista had been there last, less than a month ago, and it too smelt like Buccellati: not dirty clothes or cologne, but something more indefinite and warm. It felt like Buccellati could walk back in the door at any moment.
Mista coughed, half to get Giorno's attention and half to clear the lump in his throat.
"Boss?"
Giorno shook himself visibly out of reverie. "Oh, it's you," he said. Then he slid off the armrest and went to check Buccellati's desk drawers, as if he'd been in suspended motion and Mista's return had set him off again.
They spent the rest of the afternoon going through Buccellati's papers, which were the most important part – or so Giorno said. There was one drawer with a false bottom that wouldn't come apart until Giorno pried it up with a vine, but underneath they only found another key. It was shaped for the front door of a house, not a car or safe or coin locker. They couldn't figure out what door it opened.
That evening Mista hauled fifty-three volumes of manga back to his flat, along with all the CDs and tapes he'd lent and lost to Narancia over the years. He dropped the trash bags on the floor and stretched out on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The window was half open, and the breeze after sunset was pleasant. He could hear the lady on the ground floor call her kid in to dinner, could smell the pasta sauce on her stove. The student in the bedsit under his was picking out the chords to "E la chiamano estate" on his guitar, badly. He was indefatigable. Mista had thought more than once of knocking on his door and roughing him up a little; nothing serious, just to put the fear of the Mafia's beauty sleep into him.
Everything was the same. Everything had changed.
Eventually he rolled over, picked out volume one of Pink Dark Boy and started to read.
II.
Pink Dark Boy, Mista decided, was basically the weirdest comic ever.
"Well, expand on that," said Giorno. "What's the plot?"
"Uh. Well, there's this kid – British kid, not Japanese, this is all set in the 1920s or something – who's about sixteen, and his grandfather dies and leaves him a fortune, so he decides to start a detective agency to look for this girl who – no wait, I've got the order wrong, first he finds this notebook in a hole in the wall behind his grandfather's portrait, and it turns out that there was this secret society in Moorish Spain that was supposed to guard – is this the place?"
"None other," said Giorno. He parallel parked the Spider Quadrifoglio perfectly, shifting gears twice. Mista couldn't figure out how he did it.
He tried carrying whichever volume he was currently on around with him but never found much of a chance to read. Bodyguarding was like sniping, which in itself was something Rigatoni had to teach him: if you weren't bored ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, you weren't paying the attention required to do the job right during the remaining zero point one percent. And Mista had to represent, being frequently outnumbered.
They stayed on the move, at first. Three days in this five-star hotel; five days in that high-rise flat; a week in the Tuscan countryside, in a mansion whose rusticity was a gloss over dazzling technological convenience. Mista was dimly aware that the financial arrangements and properties had belonged to Diavolo, who apparently had lived the same lifestyle of peripateic luxury, but they never found any signs of the former boss's passage. No possessions, no stains, no fingerprints. No further clues. It was as if by his death the man had ceased to exist entirely, going backward in time as well as forward. Or perhaps the cleaning staff was merely thorough as well as discreet.
During the day Mista paid visits with Giorno, or accompanied him to luncheons and gentlemen's clubs, or – less frequently – hung around while Giorno received visitors. It didn't do for him to physically attend most of these meetings, but as long as he had a chair by the door and Giorno was within a bullet's range he could listen in. When possible he made chitchat instead, by way of keeping his ear to the ground while Giorno handled the big cheese, but the other guy's people weren't always in the mood to talk.
Giorno mostly presented himself as the successor to Buccellati, himself Polpo's heir, and thus the operative in charge of Naples, her port and adjacent territories. Early on his control was largely nominal. The succession had been ratified by direct communication with key operatives in other cities (that is, by Giorno himself), but his status among the locals was much less clear-cut. Buccellati had been an unknown quantity to most and Giorno more so. There were rumours: the hunt had been on in Venice and only called off much later. Not everyone Giorno spoke to extended their support, and some retracted it. The first weeks were full of shakeups.
"This Andrea Cacciatore," Mista would say, "word is not a single fishing boat puts out of the harbour without his go-ahead. Buccellati used to say even Polpo watched his step when Cacciatore was in the picture. And you're going to let him walk out the door like that?"
"It was an illuminating conversation," Giorno said. "We'll see how things develop."
He said that kind of thing more and more often: we'll see. It was an interesting two hours. I learnt a lot from our talk. Wait. Wait and see.
Mista reckoned they weren't waiting as much as Giorno said they were.
The heart of it, he knew, was the laptop they'd retrieved from the Colosseum. The laptop contained all that had made Diavolo the head of their organization – or rather, all the information that had proven he was. Now that it was in Giorno's hands, Giorno was the de facto leader of Passione. On days without appointments he spent hours with Polnareff and occasionally Trish, going over the kind of spreadsheet data that made Mista's eyes lose focus. Words like "remote login" and "high-level encryption" were bandied about. By himself Giorno worked late into the night, the minute plastic click-clack of the keyboard continuous whenever Mista couldn't sleep and dropped in to see how he was doing. He was constantly emailing one operative or another, tracing their actions, retrieving records, disseminating information, erasing tracks. Pulling at threads and sending out feelers. Changing one truth for another. Learning.
Mista let himself be seen at selected usual haunts, told a few tall tales of their journey and listened to the stories he was told in return. Judge so-and-so in Rome had been caught in a police raid with his pants down and a twelve-year-old girl in the room, unluckily for the faction that ran the prostitution ring he was said to favour both in and out of court. Such-and-such an operative in Milan was getting out of narcotics and into real estate speculation – either way prices were going up. Passione had turned down a deal with the Ukrainians but the boss knew what he was doing. The boss had had Polpo assassinated himself and that was why no one knew who'd ordered the hit. The boss had survived an attempt on his life and was cleaning house, anyone who didn't have sense enough to keep his head down would have hell to pay going forward. A team of stand-using hitmen had gone rogue in Venice and the boss was in hiding, no one had heard from him in weeks. Somebody answered to someone who answered to someone else who'd received direct orders from the boss just the day before. The boss was flushing out rats. The boss didn't know his right hand from his left. The boss was dead and there was going to be a war. The boss was healthy and it was business as usual. The boss had been dead for a long time now and someone else was giving the orders, but don't quote him on it or he'll deny all and call you liar to your face.
Mista recounted the rumours verbatim to Giorno, who only smiled and told him to keep up the good work.
Mista had no knack for strategic planning that went beyond that day's dinner, but gut instinct told him the endgame: eventually Giorno would let it be known that the operative in charge of Naples was the same man who headed the entirety of Passione.
By the time he did, the revelation would no longer be cause for surprise.
III.
He still had to get his hands dirty from time to time. There were incidents, guarding Giorno, and the occasional job where it had to be clear who was giving the orders. On top of it all he had to accompany Trish when she went shopping. Mista would have taken a shootout over it any day.
"I don't get why I have to carry everything," he said. Trish looked at him as if he'd sprouted another pair of arms, which frankly would have come in handy.
"You're a man, aren't you?" she said. "That's what you're here for. It's not to give an expert opinion, that's for sure."
Mista had assumed he was there in case other parties in Passione put two and two together and got bright ideas involving the word "kidnapping" again, but when he thought about it he figured Trish could handle herself. Even if she were shot at the bullets would turn to putty on contact. It was as good as he could manage.
"Come on," said Trish, "don't look so tragic. I'll treat you to gelato after."
Trish didn't shop often, thankfully, but when she did she racked up bills like there was no tomorrow. Mista theoretically had access to an identical expense account – at least, the card Giorno had given him looked the same as the one he'd given Trish – but a shirt was a shirt as far as he was concerned. If you had twenty euros you could buy a shirt for twenty euros; if you had two thousand euros you could buy a shirt for two thousand euros. At the end of the day it was something to throw over your back so as not to leave the house naked.
Besides, he liked his normal clothes.
It was funny because Mista had always figured, heaps of cash, what's not to like? But when it came to it he barely felt any different. Still the same Guido Mista, princely surroundings or not, walking the streets of Old Napoli with an eye out for trouble and a gun down his pants. He didn't like to gamble, and there was only so much food and wine you could shove down your throat if you wanted to be on the ball the next morning. Which left – what?
Girls, purportedly. Or not.
"I'm a girl," said Trish. She had her chin propped on the back of her hand to indicate she was listening. Mista brightened.
"Go out with me? I could show you a good—"
"I'll pass, thanks."
It wasn't a gelateria the way Mista liked them, or tended to frequent them. They were on the mezzanine of a gleaming Milanese covered promenade, all designer boutiques in chrome and glass and pink marble, and the rest stops were decorated to match. The stools were shaped like cocktail glasses and the tables like fountain basins. To complete the image the Pistols had flocked like pigeons to the edge of his lemon ice, ducking and shoving, and #5 was dangerously close to falling in. Mista steadied him with the back of his wooden spoon. "Back off, guys," he hissed.
Trish was still watching him. "What about Giorno?" she asked.
"What about him?"
Trish gave him a look like she could tell what he was thinking and judged it to be retarded, but when he waited she didn't press the point. Instead she turned away and made swirls in her gelato with her spoon. Stracciatella, which matched the decor and her outfit. She was wearing black ankle boots and a white sundress with a black stripe along the bottom that turned into black butterflies halfway up, except after Mista had stared at it for a while it became a black sundress with a white stripe along the top that turned into white butterflies halfway down. From a non-expert perspective he thought she looked good.
It reminded him of something. At first he couldn't place it, and then – from one blink to the next – he could.
"Trish—"
But he didn't know how to broach the topic. What was there to say?
"Giorno says we're going back to Naples tomorrow," he finished, lamely. "You sure you're not going to need another suitcase for all this stuff?"
As soon as the words were out he nearly bit his tongue, because if she decided she did he'd be the one to lug it back to the hotel. But Trish only laughed.
"It always comes back to Giorno for you," she said. "doesn't it? How long have you been his bodyguard now?"
Mista blinked. "Erm," he said. He hadn't kept count. A month? Two? "Actually, now that you—"
"Three months or thereabouts," said Trish. "And I bet he never really asked you, did he? It just happened."
"I like him," Mista said, defensively. "I trust him." Shit, he added mentally, at least Giorno knows what he's doing. Mista would have been at sea long ago.
Trish gave him an odd, lopsided smile and went back to playing with her ice cream.
"You know," she said, "So do I. That's the thing. It's like he's the sun and – and other people are just planets. Before you know it you're going in circles."
Mista couldn't tell what she was getting at. He said nothing.
"Sometimes I wonder if anyone's ever helped him solve his problems," said Trish. "You know? I wonder how far he's planned ahead. I wonder if he tells us anything, really."
IV.
At dinnertime the next evening Giorno drove the Quadrifoglio through a wrought-iron gate that swung open on its own, and up a paved driveway lined with Lombardy poplars. He parked in the courtyard before the front steps and Mista got out, turtle tucked under his arm, glancing around him. The fountain at the head of the driveway was dry, exposing the basin and the statuary's rust-stained base, but the surrounding flowerbeds were well-tended and blooming. The air smelt of roses and sunset.
Lights were already on inside, inviting.
"We'll be staying here," said Giorno. "For a while."
Weeks afterward Mista learnt the name of the estate was – properly – Villa San Raffaele; but no one called it that. The gardeners (who constituted a small standing army) called it Villa delle Farfalle, or Villa Farfalla, apparently in reference to the design of a fountain somewhere out on the grounds.
Mista suggested they change the moniker to Villa delle Coccinelle, at which they stared at him blankly until he gave up.
He wasn't sure how old the building was, or if the paintings on the walls and ceilings were famous, or what the plump naked girls and pompously robed men they depicted were named. He was sure that the architect had fancied himself a funny guy. From the vantage of the enclosed inner courtyard the layout appeared symmetrical and obvious, but in practice the rooms were divided from and opened onto each other in such a bafflingly counterintuitive manner that for the first few days Mista was constantly stumbling into closets or out onto unexpected loggias or circling back to the same drawing room from where he'd started. His bedroom technically adjoined Giorno's suite, but more than once he found himself climbing the servants' stairs to Trish's rooms while trying to get there – on the other side of the piano nobile and a floor down.
Eventually he got used to the floor plan. But in that house Giorno grew increasingly elusive; even when he came and went in plain view he was soundless.
By coincidence (Mista assumed, since design was unlikely), something very like the Villa made its first appearance in volume 17 of Pink Dark Boy, only expanded immensely in size and transported to Istanbul. Its name was the Palace of the Butterflies.
Up to said arc the series had consisted mostly of short, self-contained mysteries, in which Pink Dark Boy derived ingenious solutions to puzzling and gruesome crimes (often committed in exotic settings) and encountered hints of overarcing plot, but with the introduction of the malevolent Dr. Andrea Fulhaber the overarcing plot took over. Supernatural events made a hash of the deductive method; the humour grew darker; battles turned increasingly bloody. By volume 18 the intrepid protagonist and several associates had pursued their nemesis deep into the bowels of his palatial lair, and the alchemical properties of the architecture were making themselves known. Mista chuckled as the heroes rushed up a flight of stairs only to find themselves transported to the lower landing again. Been there, done that.
"What's so funny?" said Giorno. Mista screamed, dropped the tankoubon in his lap, then dropped it a second time on the floor as he scrambled to his feet.
"Geez, Boss—"
Giorno smiled in apology and turned back to the window. He was sitting in the upholstered alcove with his back against the panelling, hugging one bent knee, the other foot dangling. The curtains were open. Even in indirect sunlight his hair was over-bright, like some Quattrocento icon adorned in gold leaf and powdered lapis lazuli. Colours too brilliant for realism.
He was less than three metres away. Surely he hadn't been there when Mista had walked into the room... had he?
Mista couldn't read anymore. He waited, shifting his weight from foot to foot, but Giorno didn't pursue the conversation. He didn't move either, which was weird. Giorno wasn't prone to aimless staring into the middle distance.
"...Anything on the schedule for today, Boss?"
There was a pause of several seconds. "No. No appointments. Why?"
Weirder and weirder. "Uh – no, I just wondered. Haven't seen you at all since last night, I thought you were working." Mista frowned in an effort of recollection. "You weren't even at breakfast."
"I was... having a talk with Polnareff."
"In the turtle?"
No answer. Mista peered at him. "You okay, Boss?"
"Mista," Giorno said, "do you believe in fate? No, that's a foolish question. I know you do. I mean to ask, have you ever taken a step back and seen it. Understood it. Every action and reaction, all the threads that have bound you since birth – since before your birth – that drew you to this particular place, this moment in time."
He didn't sound drunk, but this was Giorno. "Um," said Mista.
Giorno turned his head to meet Mista's gaze. "I'll provide an example," he said. "Can you tell me how you arrived where you are now? When did it start?"
Was it a trick question? "Uh, well, I guess you bought this house and—" No, that wasn't it. "After we took out the old boss—"
"Before that," said Giorno.
"......We got sent on a mission to guard Trish and had to fight like fifty assassins and then it turned out the lot of us were getting screwed over by management? Boss, I'm not sure I'm—"
"Go further back," said Giorno. "Deeper. Why did we get the assignment in the first place? How did it happen?"
Mista gave up. There had to be a point to the exercise: it was Giorno. "Well, Polpo offed himself out of the blue for some reason, or maybe somebody offed him, I don't know, but Buccellati knew where he kept his stash so we went and got hold of it before anyone else did and turned it over to the organization, and that's how we got the assignment. To prove that Buccellati was capable of handling himself as an operative. ...Right?"
"It was me," Giorno said. "I killed Polpo."
"Oh." Mista considered this. "Wait... you killed Polpo? Did Buccellati know?"
"No." Giorno swung his legs down off the alcove. "I never had a chance to tell him."
"Boss—"
"An innocent man died when I joined Passione," said Giorno. "You know what the test was. I held Polpo responsible for his murder. But because Polpo died, Buccellati became an operative; because Buccellati became an operative, we were assigned to protect Trish; and because we were sworn to protect Trish, we turned against Diavolo in Venice, long before we had intended or dreamt possible or indeed considered wise. Therefore, you are here because of my actions. Quod est demonstratum."
Mista opened his mouth to tell him that conclusion was foregone. The words didn't come out: Giorno had stepped into his personal space and planted his hands against the mantelpiece to either side, and leant forward, and suddenly he was very close and Mista was very trapped.
"Or, put another way," he said, "everything that happened is my fault. Isn't it?"
"Why would—" Mista's brain belatedly caught up. "Boss, you've got it wrong, I don't think you're..."
He stopped. Giorno's lips brushed his ear, a warm tickle of breath.
"Mista," he said, "I want you to fuck me. Right now."
That deadly perfect enunciation made everything sound like an order.
"Boss," Mista heard himself say, blankly. Giorno pulled back, a little, so he could look Mista in the eyes. His gaze was intent, lips slightly parted. Mista resisted the temptation to lean forward.
"I've always wanted to see what was under there," Giorno said. "May I?"
"Wha—"
Giorno reached up and pulled on the arrow tab of Mista's hat, firmly, as if he expected a bell to ring at the other end – twice. What transpired was that Mista's bullets came tumbling out into his hand, and some of them rolled off his palm before he could react. The Pistols darted out and made catches before they reached the floor.
"Mista," #1 scolded, "be careful!"
Giorno blinked twice, then began to laugh. He closed his hand into a fist around the remaining bullets and leant his head against Mista's shoulder. His hair smelt like flowers.
Thursday, Mista thought even as his hands came up of their own volition, of course it's a Thursday. If he had had a say in anything the days of the week would have followed the example of his stand, Thursday would have been Friday and Sunday would have been... something else, and future generations would have been grateful for his foresight.
[ Parts V-VII. ]
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Date: 2009-02-22 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 10:35 am (UTC)