Chapter 6
My thoughts of Emilia were the only pleasant thing about the next four hours.
It wasn’t a slum by any means, but it was definitely one of the poorer neighborhoods in the city.
A couple of streetwalkers were standing on the corner near a cheap hotel. I knew a lot more would come out once the sun went down.
Prostitution was legal in Italy, though there were limits to what was accepted.
Soliciting customers for sex was illegal, but as long as it was kept out of the tourist-heavy areas, solicitation was usually ignored by the cops.
Especially back when the Agrellas were alive and running everything.
Brothels – defined as multiple prostitutes working under the same roof – were illegal.
Which was pretty funny, because medieval Florence was famous for its brothels.
Ancient streets in the old quarter even advertised the fact – like Via delle Belle Donne, or ‘Street of the Beautiful Women,’ and Via dell’Amorino, or ‘Sweetheart Street.’
Anyway, I went over and talked to the streetwalkers. They were enthusiastic at first because they thought I was a potential client. Then they found out who I worked for.
All of the women I’d talked to in the past few weeks knew who the Agrellas were. Six months before, they’d had to pay a cut of their profits to the family or risk getting their faces slashed with razors.
As much as they’d hated the Agrellas, though, most of them were still under the mistaken belief that the Rosolini brothers had murdered them.
Not to mention that they all knew about the Rosolinis running the pimps out of town. Some were happy about that; others weren’t.
But no matter what, as soon as the women heard who I worked for, their eyes would widen and they would start to back away.
Flashing a wad of cash would usually reel them back in for the rest of the sales pitch.
When I told them that Don Rosolini wanted to help them start a new life, they were skeptical.
After all, the Agrellas had been sons of bitches. Why would the new mafia bosses be any different?
Some of the women had heard from other prostitutes about Don Rosolini’s deal. Others were learning about it for the first time.
None of them trusted it, though.
They usually heard me out until the part where I cautioned them that if they took the money and didn’t change their lives, Don Rosolini would consider it a personal betrayal.
At that point, most of them said No thanks and walked away for good.
Nobody wanted to get on the bad side of a mafia don.
The few who were eager to take the deal usually had track marks on their arms, a sure sign of drug addiction.
I knew they would say anything to get the money. If I gave them five grand, most of them would probably be dead from an overdose within a week, so I told them to get clean first and then come find me. I told them I’d be around.
I never saw any of them again.
After talking to the streetwalkers in front of the cheap hotel and getting turned down, I started hitting up residences. When we took over the Agrellas’ operations, Roberto had found tons of prostitutes’ addresses in the family’s records, so I knew exactly where to go.
I didn’t have any better results.
My experience with a woman named Luna was unusual for how these things normally went… but the end result was the same.
First I went in a shabby four-story apartment building. There was a gate on the front door, but the lock was broken, so I walked right in.
The halls in the building had threadbare carpet and peeling paint on the walls.
There wasn’t an elevator, so I walked up the dingy, poorly lit stairs.
I found the correct address on the third floor and knocked.
The door opened a crack. There was a safety chain latched on the inside, and a single eye with heavy eyeshadow and fake lashes peered out.
“Yes?” she answered. Her voice was gravelly – the sound of a pack-a-day habit for a decade or more.
“Is your name Luna?”
The eye narrowed. “Who’s asking?”
“My name is Giorgio. I work for someone who has an offer to make you.”
“And who would that be?”
“Don Rosolini. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
“I’m not interested. Thank you.”
She started to close the door –
Until I flashed one of my wads of cash.
“Please, signorina – just five minutes of your time. It could be worth a lot of money to you.”
Her eyes flicked from the cash to my face, and she sighed. “Alright… five minutes.”
She shut the door. There was the sound of the chain being unhooked, and then the door opened all the way.
The woman who stood there was dressed in a slinky red dressing gown that ended mid-thigh. She wasn’t wearing stockings or shoes, so I could see her immaculate pedicure and red-painted toenails.
She’d probably been a beauty in her youth, but turning tricks is a hard life. My guess was that she was in her late 20s but looked ten years older.
She was still attractive, with a short bob with bangs framing a pretty face. But her makeup was a bit too thick, her frown lines were deeply set, and there was a world-weary look to her – like she’d experienced the worst that life had to offer and didn’t expect anything to ever improve.
After she closed the door and re-hooked the chain, I followed her into the apartment. Everything was clean and tidy, but there was a shabbiness to the place. Stained carpets, worn linoleum in the tiny kitchen. The air smelled like stale cigarette smoke and cheap perfume.
“Want anything to drink?” she asked in a tone that suggested she didn’t want me to take her up on her offer.
“No, thank you.”
She gestured at a cloth-upholstered couch. I checked for suspicious stains before I sat down.
She walked across the small room, lowered herself into an overstuffed chair, and crossed her bare legs demurely. The small table next to her held an overflowing ashtray, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, a half-empty bottle of cheap white wine, and a long-stemmed glass with lipstick stains on it.
She lit a cigarette and took a drag. “I’ve heard about you.”
“About me, or – ”
“Your boss and his offer. One of you guys talked to my friend last week, and she told me about it. Five thousand euros, right?”
“That’s right. Did your friend mention what you would have to do to get it?”
Luna gave a sardonic smirk and gestured around the room. “Give up all this and start a new life.”
I smiled gently. “Yes. But I have to caution you, my employer doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. If you were to take the money and continue in your… current profession, my boss would be very angry. He would take it as a personal affront and a betrayal.”
“My friend told me that part, too,” she said, taking another puff. “I have a question.”
I gestured like, Go ahead.
“Why is he doing this? Your employer?”
It was a common question. I’d heard it fairly often.
“He only recently took control of his family’s business, and now that he’s in charge, he wants to change how things are done. He’s concerned that women in your… profession… were forced into lives that they never wanted.”
“He’s concerned, is he,” she said in a tone that indicated she didn’t think he was concerned at all.
“Yes.”
“How’d you find me?”
“His old business partners kept records.”
For the first time, I heard a note of fear in her voice. “The Agrellas.”
“Yes. The Agrellas.”
Her eyes fixed on me through the drifting smoke. “…is it true what they say?”
“I don’t know – what do they say?”
“That your boss… ‘retired’ his old business partners.”
I shook my head. “No. In fact, it was the Agrellas who betrayed my boss. They were killed by someone else they were working with.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, obviously not believing me.
“You have nothing to fear from my employer,” I reassured her.
“Uh-huh,” she repeated in the exact same tone of voice. “Wasn’t it your employer who drove all the pimps out of town?”
“It was.”
“Did the pimps have ‘anything to fear’ from your employer?”
“That’s different. Don Rosolini wants to stop the victimization of women such as yourself, so he forced out the people responsible for it.”
“I didn’t have a pimp, so it didn’t affect me,” she said, taking another puff. “But it affected some of my friends.”
“I see. Do you – ”
“One of them was beaten up last week by a customer of hers.”
I paused a second, angry at the piece of shit who’d hurt her friend.
Then I said, “I’m sorry to hear that. She should go to the police and report the man.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to change anything,” Luna said darkly.
I frowned. “I don’t understand. Do you want us to – ”
“Look,” she interrupted, “I have something to say. I hope you’ll convey it to your boss and let him know that I mean it with all due respect.”
“Alright… go ahead.”
She took a sip of her wine as though steeling herself, then set down the glass.
“I’m going to take you at your word and believe that everything you’ve said is true. That your boss wants to right some wrongs and do some good.
“But running all the pimps out of town wasn’t the way to do it.
Yes, I know your boss is trying to get rid of violent men…
but in this line of work, there’s always violent men.
Some of them are customers. As bad as the pimps are, they fuck up the violent customers so they’re afraid to try anything.
So when your boss ran all the pimps out of town, he left a lot of women exposed. ”
“Are you saying he shouldn’t have tried to help?” I asked coolly.
“I’m saying that throwing all of them out was like using a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I’m guessing your boss is too busy to concern himself with details like that, but if he’s trying to help women on the streets, it’s things like that that actually matter.”
I couldn’t argue with what she was saying.
“As far as the money,” she continued, “I’ve been doing this since I was 19. I’m 31 now. I don’t know how to do anything else.
“If it was just me, I might try. I might take the money and make a go of it. But I have a little girl to support.”
I looked around in alarm –
“She’s not here,” Luna said. “My sister keeps her when I’m seeing clients, and I pay her a little something for helping me out.
“The money you’re offering? I make that in one month, easily.
“Five grand isn’t much. It might keep me afloat for two months. Three, if I really stretched it.
“But what am I supposed to do in three months? Go back to school? Learn a trade? I can’t get a normal job.
Nobody’s going to hire me. No bank or store would ever give me a second look.
What am I supposed to put on a résumé? The most I could hope for is maybe bartending, and even then, I doubt that. ”
“What are you going to do when you can’t get customers anymore?” I asked gently.
She smiled flirtatiously. “If they were all as handsome as you, I think I could do this forever.”
I gave her a polite smile back. “Thank you, but I’m serious. What about the future?”
She settled back in her chair and sighed. “I don’t know. Mostly I don’t think about it. I’ve got a while before I have to.
“But what I do know is, 5000 euros is not enough to start a new life. So, please tell your boss ‘thank you,’ but I can’t take his offer. And I don’t think anybody who’s being honest with you would take his deal. Not unless they’re young and can start over.
“I’m not. And I can’t. If your boss really wants to help women like me, he needs to figure out another way to do it. With all due respect.”
I sat there in silence and thought for a minute.
Everything she said explained a lot. It was the same exact vibe I’d gotten from 99% of the other women I’d talked to – although none of them had told me why they weren’t interested.
And I couldn’t dispute anything Luna had said. It made perfect sense.
All that was left was for me to ask, “You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I’m sure.”
“Well… thank you for your time. I’ll tell my boss what you said – ”
“Please let him know I meant it with all due respect,” she interrupted, a quiver of fear in her voice.
“I will,” I assured her. “Like I said, you have nothing to fear from my employer. I promise.”
She nodded like she wanted to believe me, but couldn’t. She’d seen far too much to ever trust anyone ever again.
“Well… I guess I should see you out,” she said flatly.
“Okay.”
She walked me over to the door and unchained the lock.
As I was walking out, she said, “Maybe you guys are different.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Agrellas would’ve never offered any money in the first place. They would’ve just threatened us until we did what they wanted.”
“I’m telling you the truth: my boss is different.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said, then smiled sadly as she closed the door.