Malavita Page 24

  It was good to talk again, to let ourselves go.

  I said to myself, why deny him his vocation if it’s his destiny to go back there and reconquer my kingdom, and once more raise the family flag? Nobody should stand in his way.

  Maybe my son would succeed where I had failed.

  My fatherly role would now be to help him overcome obstacles – he could benefit from my experience.

  But I was one step behind. Warren no longer wanted this inheritance. He wanted no part of this barbarity, a word he used several times. He had realized this an hour earlier at the So Long station. I couldn’t quite tell if this made him sad or relieved. In any case, there was no anger in his voice.

  What he had just lived through had, in just a few seconds, aged him by ten years. I suppose that’s what’s meant by growing up, becoming an adult, but then he asked me the worst question ever: he asked me if I thought that society would one day manage to finally get rid of people like me. Whether there was any hope at all for the world in which he was going to grow up, and perhaps be a father himself.

  Anyone who has been a father will recognize this moment – the day your kid questions everything you stand for. You tell yourself that it’s just an adolescent phase, that he’ll understand eventually and come round to your way of thinking. The difference here was that I knew that Warren would never come round.

  He’d asked the question. I had to answer. After all, it was probably the last time he’d ever listen to me. I was tempted to lie, and give him a bit of paternal reassurance. But, out of respect for the man he would become, I went ahead and told him what I truly thought: “No, my son, the world will never get rid of guys like me. Because for every new law there’s a wise guy ready to break it. And so long as there’s a middle way, there’ll be those who opt for the margins. And so long as men have vices, there’ll be other men prepared to supply them. Still, maybe in a thousand years or so, who knows?”

  Tom felt a bit awkward interrupting this tête-à-tête, but he managed to convey to me that there was still some work to do. Warren and I shook hands in a manly fashion. He said he’d never touch a gun again, but that he didn’t regret having done so just once, and not just to save me – in a way it was to restore me to life, and pay off the debt that all sons owe to their progenitor. The slate was now wiped clean. He could henceforth live the life of an honest man with nothing dragging him back, no millstone round his ankle.

  And then? What can I say about what happened next?

  What happened next gave the word “barbarity” its full meaning once more. Tom and I decided to separate again. So I was going back up towards the Place de la Libération, and I found myself alone in an empty bar, up against Hector Sosa. I had to face him empty-handed, although I would have been more than happy to get rid of him with a couple of bullets. A fist fight was the worst possible option – there was nothing Hector liked better than crushing noses with his fists. Well, everything went into that fucking fight, bottles smashed on the skull, chairs, even tables. This level of damage usually came with a full gang fight, but there were just the two of us. Anything went – we both liked a straight fight, no weapons, just fists. I had held on to my temper for too long (it was what I used to save in the past for the bad payers, the ones who had to be beaten up, but kept alive in the hope of an eventual payment). To tell the truth, I launched into this fight in a rage, but it was a beneficial rage, it unwound me, relaxed me, rather like yoga, or Zen, or a seawater cure. It cleared the mind of a whole lot of grudges and unresolved issues. There’s no better therapy for a guy like myself. But all the same, I soon got fed up with it. I was getting my face smashed up, and really, this saloon-bar brawl had gone on long enough. But my opponent wouldn’t go down; it seemed impossible to knock him out once and for all.

  Still, in the end, there’s got to be one left standing and one on the ground, that’s the way things are. Did one of us have more to lose than the other? That’s the only possible explanation for what happened. Hector stared at me, between two streams of blood trickling down his face. He was dumbfounded. He had notched up heavyweights and middleweights in his time, and he could not understand how this Manzoni guy could still be standing. It was beyond anything he could possibly understand. He collapsed on the ground after a whiplash blow from a chair, and then sank into unconsciousness, which looked as though it might last for ever.

  For his part, Tom Quint had got rid of Joey Wine, Jerry’s brother, without too much trouble. I’d gladly have swapped jobs. Joey’s problem was his addiction, and his addiction was banks. He couldn’t resist a bank. And if you’ve got an addiction you can’t resist, it’ll get you in the end – all the warnings, sermons and enforced or voluntary treatments in the world won’t stop you. Where Gizzi would sometimes spend several months preparing a bank job, Joey would break in to a bank in the same way as you might suddenly take a pee. While Paul would embark on a long courtship, Joey would slap his hand on the victim’s ass. He’d get himself beaten up, but it never changed anything, he’d just start all over again even more enthusiastically. I can still remember the day Joey was let out after serving a four-year sentence for robbing a branch of Chase. After coming out of San Quentin, he drove for two hours, thinking about his wife and two daughters, whom he hadn’t kissed for years, and the friends with whom he was planning a celebration that night. Then he found himself driving through a little deserted town. A little bank in the high street “called out to him,” as he put it.

  Who knows if was the pain of having missed something for so many abstemious years, but Joey sat in his car for an hour, gazing rapturously at this beautiful little bank, a small voice inside him insisting: “Carry on driving, you fool, you know perfectly well how this will end up, think of your daughters, do you really want to go straight back to that hellhole?” and another voice saying: “Isn’t she beautiful! If you miss this chance, you’ll regret it all your life.” In the end, the temptation was too great, and within two days he was back in his cell, with an extended reoffender’s sentence. You can’t help truly sick people like Joey. One day it would all end badly.

  As Tom walked past the biggest bank in So Long, on the corner of the Place de la Libération, he glimpsed an odd sight through the window: there was Joey, on the other side of the counter, hurling himself like a madman against a connecting door. For Tom, it was almost painful to see the guy, with his incurable illness, losing all contact with reality, and he even paused for a second before wasting him, wondering to himself if these villains actually preferred the theft itself to the money, the sensation being more important than the reward.

  We’d had that conversation a hundred times over. Tom wanted to make me admit that I’d become a mobster because of the adrenalin rush, in the same way as a gambler who is equally excited by winning or losing. I would insist that the only thing that drove us was money. “But how can you love money to such a point?” he would say, and I would try to explain to him that we Cosa Nostra thugs were obsessed by money, but how can such an obsession be explained? Just the thought that our money was piling up somewhere, that it was flooding in, that soon we’d need another place to pile up all those banknotes, that was our obsession, our passion. OK, sometimes we used it to buy stuff, to give pleasure to our families, but that sure wasn’t the object of the exercise. In any case, nobody was worse than we were at spending it. I admit it: we only liked showy stuff. If it was shiny or gold, we’d buy it. Expensive? Priceless? We had to have it. The best stuff was always the most expensive.

  The funny thing was that we enjoyed spending just as much as getting stuff for free. That was another passion of ours, just as strong as our love of money: gifts, stuff fallen off the backs of trucks, payments in kind, whether we needed them or not. If we were protecting a guy whose pizza chain was doing well, we’d go off with a few thousand dollars and a couple of pizzas for the road. Same with furriers or bathroom shops. We’d load ourselves up with rubbish that we’d end
up throwing away. Tom couldn’t understand this: “What, it’s really worth rotting in jail for that? Or getting a bullet between the eyes? Killing guys? Having trouble around you every day of your life? Ruining your families?” The cop, he just didn’t get it. And I gave up trying to explain it all, because, to tell the truth, I didn’t really understand it myself.

  Anyway, Joey finally got three bullets in the kisser, just at the moment the door he was breaking down, the door to God knows what, finally collapsed. Tom then came and joined me on the Place de la Libération. I waited for him, sitting on the merry-go-round, which was still going round.

  *

  By the evening, So Long had become the centre of the universe. I found myself reliving the nightmare of the trial: an army of journalists from all over the world, interviewing anyone they could, politicians, “observers,” intellectuals, VIPs, popular singers – as well as the man in the street, whom they found in the street, and who was all too delighted to offer his opinion on the affair. Everybody had something to say about my story, my testifying, my betrayal; some wanted answers from me. I felt I was being tried by the whole of humanity.

  That was almost literally true! They poured in from all over the place: TV trucks, helicopters, private jets. A swarm of CNN people, hundreds of reporters, thousands of eager spectators hemmed in by police forces from the four neighbouring départements, as well as special detachments sent in from Paris. All this to try and make sense of what had happened that day in this unknown little dump in Normandy.

  The American networks had shared the material they had on my trial, and it was being played over and over again now on European TV. The snitch’s whole history was being retold, and by nine o’clock, everybody knew everything – or at least they thought they did. What was worrying me most was that among the corpses being swept up in the streets, one was missing, the worst one of them all.

  Matt Gallone had disappeared. Knowing Matt, there was nothing surprising about that. He was never where you expected him to be. A beat was organized, with a dozen volunteers; his description was circulated; roadblocks were put up. Matt had always dreamed of being public enemy number one, and the great day had come. Quint seemed so sure of himself – he’ll go south, he said. He said that if Matt managed to make it to Sicily, he’d be taken care of by the Cosa Nostra for as long as necessary, years maybe, before going back to the States. He was right, of course, but I dreaded another possible scenario: that he might still be in So Long. Nobody in Europe knew him as well as I did. As long as there was a single breath left in his body, he would continue to carry out his grandfather’s orders. He would choose a thousand deaths rather than one minute of shame, after this day that marked the final downfall of the Gallone clan. I swear to you, I’d have been happy to be wrong about that.

  They put me in quarantine while they decided what to do with me. The hotlines between Washington and Paris were buzzing, and the most unlikely authorities quarrelled over who should be in charge of prisoner Manzoni, claiming reasons of state and security. The American government, the secret services, the FBI, but also all the different branches of the French police, right down to the little captain of the So Long gendarmerie who had been one of the hostages on the big wheel (he claimed that he might never recover from the humiliation of that experience). It was a legal, political and diplomatic headache, to say the least. Myself, I gave up trying to understand anything. I’d been kept in hiding for years, everything possible had been done to keep me invisible, and suddenly my face was all over the place, and everybody wanted a piece of me. Luckily I’m the vicious sort – if I had any goodness in me, I’d have gone mad.

  They all agreed on one point: the whole world wanted me, and the whole world must be satisfied. That would be the only way to avoid a political and PR disaster, and to keep the public at bay. People must have the chance to SEE Giovanni Manzoni, and hear him too. Whether I was a living legend, or a criminal bastard, I was obliged to make an appearance. After that, they said, everything would settle down again, and justice could be allowed to take its course.

  Tom Quint, more than anyone, was determined to show that I had survived the So Long reprisals. He was the overall winner in the whole affair: in half a day he had got rid of the elite of several branches of organized crime, and the Witness Protection Programme was now famous throughout the world, and shown to be successful – after all, it had protected the life of a snitch with all the ferocity of a pit bull terrier. Already dozens of mafiosi were on the line from all parts of the United States offering to testify. This was the apogee of Tom’s career. But to achieve a completely successful outcome to the operation, I had to agree to appear before the cameras.

  And all I wanted to do was to tell them to go hang. I had just been given permission to join my family in the basement of the Town Hall, and I had no desire to be exhibited before a million viewers. I really didn’t feel like being an object of rage and disgust to a whole lot of strangers. The irony was, I aroused a lot of other feelings in the public mind: curiosity of course, but sympathy too, compassion even. And of course a whole gamut of other reactions, from indignation to pure hatred. But indifference – never. And indifference was all I wanted at that moment. I knew already how the little TV interview would play out. I would be bombarded with negative waves and bad vibrations (I believe in that sort of thing), and I didn’t think I’d be able to deal with the consequences of all that hatred.

  “You haven’t got the choice,” Tom said. “If you don’t do it, we’ll both be lynched. Let’s get it over with, this day’s gone on long enough. Then I’ll buy you a drink.”

  I asked him if there was any way to get out of that, at least. He burst out laughing and led me up to the cameras. You can picture the scene – a little platform with microphones on it, a hundred journalists, and the whole world watching.

  “Gotta do it, Fred.”

  “You sure?”

  In other words, are you sure you want to exhibit that hardened villain Giovanni Manzoni to the world? I was exhausted by life in general and in particular by the battle I had just fought. I was about to arouse more reflexes of hatred from all sides. All of humanity was about to curse me in every language, spit on the ground, threaten me, point me out to their children. From east to west, north to south, at sea and on the land, in deserts and cities, among the rich and the poor. Surely the world didn’t need this – in fact what it needed was the exact opposite.

  That’s when I had my idea.

  Belle, my diamond, my princess.

  I really would be a proper writer if I could find the right words to describe my daughter’s look. But who could do such a thing?

  She said yes at once when I suggested that she take my place – I couldn’t understand why she agreed, but we’d all be the winners. Her face lit up even before she came under the spotlights. And the people saw it, that inner light; they felt it, that inner peace in her heart. When she smiled, each man thought that smile was for him alone. She’s a miracle, Belle. A Madonna like her is made to be seen.

  She gave good news about the family, and especially about her dad. It was as though she was reassuring the population of five continents about my fate. For a minute Belle was the most famous and the most watched girl in the world. She left the stage, more glowing than ever, with a little gesture that seemed to promise a return.

  *

  Night finally fell on So Long, and everything returned to normality. The inhabitants returned to their beds after this day of madness, trucks began loading up again, and even the police lay low, awaiting new orders. Tom installed camp beds for my little family at number 9 Rue des Favorites, the Feds’ villa. His two lieutenants, each with a pump-action gun, stood guard in the sitting room, while Tom and me leaned on the window sill, knocking back the bourbon we’d been dreaming of all day.

  Malavita was trying to sleep, next to the boiler in the basement, wrapped in several metres of bandage. She had had quite
enough of this fucking day. The state they’d found her in – who would do such a thing to a dog? When I saw her in that condition, I just wanted to look after her, to help her to recover, and then take her for walks in the forest, play with her in the garden, teach her a few tricks, let her come and go freely, in short give her back a taste for life. I think she felt the same way.

  But before that she had a score to settle, and as quickly as possible. And that’s exactly what happened that very night, after everyone had gone to sleep. They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Not for her it wasn’t. It fell into her mouth, freshly cooked.

  She heard the basement window squeaking, and felt someone’s presence, and then saw a shape in the dark. The intruder had no idea that the dog was there, in the dark, still alive. She recognized him by his smell, or maybe just by instinct. How could she forget him? You never forget, and you never forgive. What people say about all that is just crap.

  In the dark, Matt had found the stairs that would take him up to me. He was prepared to die just to get my guts, and avenge the honour of his family and every other mafioso. Omertà would have the final word.

  He must have frozen when he heard the growl. A fucking dog? Yes, it was that fucking dog he’d beaten up that afternoon. He didn’t even know what it was called.

  Malavita.

  One of the many names Sicilians call the Mafia. Malavita, lowlife. I always thought it had a more melodious sound than “Mafia,” “Onorevole Società,” “the Octopus,” or the “Cosa Nostra.” The Malavita.

  Since I’d been forbidden to refer to my secret society under any name whatsoever, I could still call my dog anything I wanted, and shout her name everywhere, just for old times’ sake.

  From the condition of the body when they found it the next morning, it seemed that Malavita had leaped at Matt’s throat and torn it out with one bite. And I’ll lay a bet that she then went straight back to huddle against the boiler and go to sleep, content at last.