The European Enigma (LSD, #9)

39. The Slovakian Sponsor

The Slovakian Sponsor

"This place gives me the creeps. Is it really necessary we go inside with you, Boss?"

The well-dressed lady looked over her shoulder, raised an eyebrow and asked: "Afraid you'll meet some old friends here, Juraj? Dead men tell no tales."

Juraj looked at his shoes, fine Italian leather, polished with care: "Sorry, Boss."

The lady faced the door and finished the discussion: "When I go somewhere, I go with my bodyguards."

She knocked three times.

Ten seconds later, the front door of Slovakian Sepultura Services opened on a crack. An eye looked at the nocturnal visitors and asked: "Do you have an appointment?"

The lady stuck the barrel of a Beretta Nano into the eye: "Here's my business card."

"I see... We always have late visitors here, like the late Mrs Durica, the late Mr Hrisovsky, the late..."

"Do you want to be late too?"

The eye muttered an excuse, took the steel chain from the door, and let his guests in.

"Do you know who I am?", the lady asked with a voice as cool as a body on ice.

"Yes, ma'am. You're Paula Camponelli. According to the local newspaper and the most popular magazines, you are the head of organized crime in this country."

"You're dead right, but the local newspaper is not very reliable. I'm the head of organized crime in Eastern Europe. But I'm not here to tell you the story of my life. I'm here to do business with you."

"Please, come in. It will be best if we go to my office. Or are you interested in any of the clients we have here waiting for their funeral ceremonies?"

Paula and her two bodyguards followed the undertaker to his office, where he offered the lady a chair and a glass of red wine. She accepted the chair but refused the wine.

"You said you wanted to talk business with me? It was not convenient for you to do this during office hours?", the undertaker asked. He could hardly sit still, dividing his concentration between the middle-aged lady and the two gorillas behind her chair.

"The problem is... We have no time to waste. Business is going down. We're in a crisis. Don't worry. We won't harm you. On the contrary. We want a partnership with you."

The undertaker was hardly interested. If someone puts a gun in your face in the middle of the night to tell you she won't harm you, somehow, words don't seem to have any meaning: "I see... May I ask the reason for the declining results? You suffer too much competition from small criminals?"

"On the contrary: too much competition from big criminals. Banks and credit-card companies have taken over the loan-sharking. Illegal gambling is now in the hands of the government; they legalised online gambling and rob us of our share of the profit, calling it 'taxes'. We used to earn money through prostitution, but those girls all go to the West now because clients there pay better. Illegal alcohol, our fourth wheel on our mafia staff car, dried up fully. Prices are so low that almost everybody can become an alcoholic now. Our latest and most profitable products were drugs, but now everybody seems to sell them. There is just too much market, and illegal dealers don't us to organize them. We're kind of... jobless."

"I see... It seems the Godfather days are over. Now terrorists are the most popular topic in the news. Citizens can't get enough of them. Thanks to all the publicity in the media, terrorists raised their activities from one attack per year to one each week. Politics profit from it too: most citizens don't know the name of their city's mayor until a nice bloody suicide bombing breaks in on their TV program. The terrorists themselves, with their names and photos on every front page, are more famous than the current number one on the Billboard top 100 music chart. They don't live to like it, but their mothers can be proud and their friends all think: «I want that too». And when there are no terrorist attacks, the attention goes to the scandals of the bank managers, of political parties, and directors of government or semi-government organizations who have stolen millions."