A Pimp's Notes by Giorgio Faletti Page A

greeting.
    After we walk a few steps together, Daytona utters a phrase in a low voice, to keep from being overheard.
    “With all the money we left on the table, he could at least have said buona notte .”
    I stop and give him a look.
    “Don’t try to drag me into a first person plural that has nothing to do with me. With all the money that you left on the table, is what you mean.”
    Daytona’s face lights up, as if he’d suddenly remembered something.
    “Speaking of money…”
    He pauses to unlock the Porsche. He gets in and waits until I’m sitting beside him before he continues.
    “You remember that pine fiece of ass that I took upstairs this morning, the one we picked up in front of the Ascot and that thanks to you cost me a bundle of cash?”
    The one that we picked up?
    That’s what I think, but I say nothing and wait. Daytona continues, working himself up. “A fantastic body. A figure to knock your eyes out. A couple of tits straight out of science fiction and an ass that talks, eloquently. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, her ass has even given a few interviews.”
    He starts the engine. He puts the car in gear and pulls out toward the front gate.
    “If you want to give her a whirl, believe me, you won’t regret it. She already told me that if I want to see her again I’ll have to up the rate, so she can go fuck herself as far as I’m concerned. But I think that she’d be willing to give you a discount. Wait a minute…”
    He slips two fingers into the breast pocket of his jacket and extends a little sheet of paper folded in half to me.
    “Here, she even gave me her phone number. Give her a call, take some good advice from a miserable idiot like me.”
    I unfold the wrinkled little piece of paper and look at it. In the half-light inside the car I can just make out a number written in a feminine hand. I crumple it up and drop it into the ashtray. Daytona observes and objects.
    “You know, you’re making a mistake. That girl is first-class.”
    I dismiss the subject with a few words, and I hope they’re definitive.
    “I know plenty of first-class girls. One more won’t change my life.”
    All the same, as we pull out of the gate, I feel a strange sense of annoyance at Daytona’s appraisals of the girl. And as we bounce along the unpaved road on our way back to blacktop, I find myself thinking that our Carla turned out to be a quick study. Then, for the rest of the trip, in spite of my driver’s senseless chatter, I can see her face before me and in my mind I hear those words over and over.
    If it was you, I’d do it for free …

 
    6
    The taxi comes to a halt near the front door of the Ascot Club and my stomach is doing somersaults. The cabbie, a hippyish-looking guy with long hair and a reddish beard you’d expect to see on a hobo, has a face that reminds me of Chewbacca, the hairy first mate from Star Wars . I couldn’t say whether the Wookiee drove his spaceships the same way. But one thing I can say is that we definitely made at least two or three leaps into hyperspace on the journey from Piazza Napoli to here.
    I give him the fee he demands even though, as usual, the total doesn’t seem to square with the readout on the meter. There are taxi drivers in Milan who’d be willing to ask you for a special late-night supplemental fee in the middle of the day just because you’re wearing sunglasses, and charge you extra for luggage just because you’ve got a wallet in your back pocket. I watch him pull out safe and sound, even though I feel like telling him to go fuck himself.
    But it’s a nice evening, I’ve just solved a problem, I’m alone, and I’m in precisely the right mood for being alone.
    Just a short while before, after we entered the city of Milan and as we were driving along Via Giambellino, Daytona suddenly stopped his freewheeling talk of women, cars, and the large amounts of money that are always just about to come to him. Today he’s expecting a payment from a certain