Page 85 of Marcello

This is the part where the hero realizes he’s not in a gangster film –

He’s in a horror movie.

Cesare’s laugh became unhinged. “But the guy she fucked? I sliced his face off with a razor blade. She wouldn’t have wanted to fuck him anymore after that, cuz she woulda had to have been into dead guys.”

I just sat there, frozen in silence.

Cesare smiled and sighed contentedly. I almost expected him to say, Good times.

Then he returned to the present.

“Alright,” he said brusquely, “let’s go.”

He drove the Maserati through the painted iron gate and tore off down the road.

I didn’t say a single fucking thing all the way back to Naples.

27

We pulled up to a squat brick building in a poor part of town. Cesare parked the car in an alley near a side entrance.

When he opened the door to the building, a puff of cold air hit my face, and my nostrils filled with a stench I’d never encountered before – a combination of manure, blood, and the smell of rancid grease.

I quickly realized why: the building was a meat-packing plant. Dozens of sides of beef hung from hooks like a horror movie lit by fluorescent lights.

We walked past workers dressed in long white jackets smeared with streaks of red. They all wore hard hats and plastic shields over their faces.

Though Cesare didn’t even acknowledge them, they all respectfully bowed their heads as he strolled past. Several said, “Buongiorno, padrò” – Neapolitan for Hello, Boss.

We reached the end of the building, where Cesare opened a massive metal door that looked like a cold storage vault for a restaurant.

Inside was a much smaller room without the slabs of beef. However, there were racks of dumbbells, a weight bench, and several pieces of exercise equipment. A punching bag hung from one of the same hooks that would have ordinarily been used for a side of beef.

Several guys in Cesare’s crew were standing around: Cicciobello, Ciro, and Toro.

In front of them, tied to a chair, was a man in a black suit.

The upper half of his white shirt was stained red, his hair was wet and bedraggled, and his face was smeared with blood.

I froze in shock as he locked eyes with me.

He must have interpreted my expression of horror as the look of a sympathetic soul.

“HELP!” he screamed in Italian. “CALL THE POLI– ”

Toro cut the guy off mid-sentence by punching him in the face.

I glanced behind me at the meat-packing workers.

They must have heard the man’s screaming –

But they all just averted their eyes and went about their work.

“Get the fuck inside,” Cesare snapped.

As soon as I stepped into the meat locker, he slammed the door shut behind us.

“He talk yet?” he asked the other men in the room.