Read Online Numero Zero by Umberto Eco - Free Book Online Page A

mention a possible line of investigation. The story was this. In the Porta Ticinese district, in a part of the city that was becoming increasingly popular with tourists, there was a restaurant and pizzeria called Paglia e Fieno. Maia, who lives by the canals, has been walking past it for years. And for years this vast restaurant, through whose windows you could glimpse at least a hundred seats, was always depressingly empty, except for a few tourists drinking coffee at the tables outside. And it wasn’t as if the place was abandoned. Maia had once been inside, out of curiosity, and was alone, except for a small family group twenty tables farther down. She had ordered a dish of
paglia e fieno
, of course, with a quarter liter of white wine and some apple tart, all excellent fare and reasonably priced, with extremely polite waiters. Now, if someone runs premises as vast as that, with staff, kitchen, and so forth, and no one goes there for years, if they had any sense they would sell it off. And yet Paglia e Fieno has been open for maybe ten years, pretty well three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
    â€œThere’s something strange going on there,” observed Costanza.
    â€œNot really,” replied Maia. “The explanation is obvious. It’s a place owned by the triads, or the Mafia, or the Camorra. It’s been bought with dirty money and it’s a good, upfront investment. But, you say, the investment is already there, it’s in the value of the building, and they could keep it shut down, without putting any more money into it. And yet no—it’s open and running. Why?”
    â€œYes, why?” asked Cambria again.
    Her reply revealed that Maia had a smart little brain. “The premises are used, day in day out, for laundering dirty money that’s constantly flowing in. You serve the few customers who turn up each evening, but each evening you ring up a series of false till receipts as though you’d had a hundred customers. Once you’ve registered that amount, you take it to the bank—and perhaps, so as not to attract attention to all that cash, since no one’s paying by credit card, you open accounts in twenty different banks. On this sum, which is now legal, you pay all the necessary taxes, after generous deductions for operating expenses and supplies (it’s not hard to get false invoices). It’s well known that for money laundering you have to count on losing fifty percent. With this system, you lose much less.”
    â€œBut how do you prove all this?” asked Palatino.
    â€œSimple,” replied Maia. “Two revenue officers go there for dinner, a man and woman, looking like newlyweds, and as they’re eating they look around and see there are, let’s say, just two other customers. Next day the police go and check, find that a hundred till receipts have been rung up, and I’d like to see what those people will have to say for themselves.”
    â€œIt’s not so simple,” I pointed out. “The two revenue officers go there, say, at eight o’clock, but however much they eat, they will have to leave by nine, otherwise they’ll look suspicious. Who can prove that the hundred customers weren’t there between nine and midnight? You then have to send at least three or four couples to cover the evening. Now, if they do a check the next morning, what’s going to happen? The police are thrilled to find someone’s been underdeclaring, but what can they do with someone who’s declaring too much? The restaurant can always say the machine got stuck, that it kept printing out the same thing. And what then? A second check? They’re not stupid, they’ve now figured out who the officers are, and when they come back they won’t ring up any false till receipts that evening. Or the police have to keep checking night after night, sending out half an army to eat pizzas, and perhaps after a year they’d