Malavita Page 4

  The irony is that, in my previous life, I sometimes had to take care of someone with a price on his head, like I have today (“take care of” with us means stopping the guy in question from doing any more harm). Liquidation of witnesses wasn’t my speciality, I was sidekick to a hitman (a contract killer as outsiders call them) who had been told by my then bosses to whack that snitch Harvey Tucci, for two hundred thousand dollars – unheard of. We had to scratch our heads for weeks to find a way of preventing him from going before a grand jury, and I’m talking about a time when the FBI hadn’t quite got the hang of guarding the stool pigeons (we showed the Feds a thing or two, but that’s another story). Anyway, the contract on me is a hundred times bigger than that ass Tucci’s. Try and imagine for a second what it’s like to be exposed to the flower of organized crime, the most determined killers, the greatest professionals, all ready to drop you on any street corner. I should be scared stiff. Fact is, deep down, I’m quite flattered.

  “Maggie, make me some tea!”

  Fred had shouted loud enough from the veranda to wake Malavita, who gave a little growl and went straight back to sleep. Maggie heard, too, but felt no sense of urgency, and remained slumped in front of the television screen in the bedroom. Fred, irritated by the lack of response, risked losing the thread of his inspiration, and left the typewriter.

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  Lying back on the bed, annoyed by her husband’s intrusion just at the denouement of the soap plot, she paused the cassette.

  “Don’t play the macho Italian with me, will you?”

  “But . . . I’m working, sweetie . . .”

  Maggie had to suppress her irritation at the word “working,” irritation which had been mounting ever since they had arrived in Cholong a month earlier.

  “Might we know what it is you’re doing with that typewriter?”

  “I’m writing.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Giovanni.”

  She only used his real name in extreme situations, either very tense or very tender ones. He was going to have to confess to what he had been doing on the veranda from 10 a.m. onwards, bent over a bakelite antique, and explain to them the full urgency of this project which had filled him with such unusual energy and plunged him into such delicious confusion.

  “You can make fools of the neighbours if you like, but please spare me and your kids.”

  “I’ve TOLD you, I’m WRITING, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You can hardly even read! You couldn’t even write down the things you say! The neighbour at number five told me you were hatching something about the Normandy landings! I had to nod like an idiot . . . The landings? You don’t even know who Eisenhower was!”

  “Fuck the landings, Maggie. That was just a pretext. I’m writing something else.”

  “Might I know what?”

  “My memoirs.”

  At that, Maggie realized that all was lost. She had known her husband for ever, and now it seemed he was no longer the man she had known a month ago, the man whose every gesture and intonation she knew by heart, and understood.

  And yet Fred wasn’t lying. He had, with no regard for chronology, been going back, as the whim took him, over the happiest period of his life, the thirty years he had spent at the heart of the New York Mafia, and then the most painful – the time when he turned government witness. Captain Thomas Quintiliani had, after tracking him for four years, succeeded in cornering clan boss Giovanni Manzoni, and had forced him to testify at a trial which had brought down three of the biggest gang leaders, the capi who controlled the East Coast. One of them was Don Mimino, capo di tutti i capi, the head of all the “five families” in New York.

  There had followed the period of the Witness Protection Programme, “WITSEC,” those stinking arrangements that supposedly protected those who had snitched from reprisals. Reliving the most shameful moments of one’s existence was no doubt the price anyone would have to pay for embarking on the writing of their memoirs. Fred would have to spell out every letter of every forbidden word: snitching, flipping, ratting out on your friends, condemning the oldest of them to sentences ten times their great ages and a thousand times their life expectancy (Don Mimino had copped three hundred and fifty-one years, a number everyone found perplexing, including Quintiliani). Fred would not duck out of it, he would go right to the end of his confession; that was one thing you could count on – he never did anything by halves. In the days when he was in charge of eliminating troublesome types, he would never leave any identifiable pieces lying around; if he was in charge of protection in some particular district, no shopkeeper was allowed to escape his payoff, not even the man selling umbrellas in the street. The hardest part of the story would be reliving the two years spent preparing for the trial; it had been a period of total paranoia, when he moved hotels every four days, surrounded by agents, and only saw his children once a month. Up until that famous morning when he had held up his hand before all of America and taken the oath.

  Before reaching that point, however, he would relive gentler memories, rediscover the best part of his life, the happy days of his youth, his first gun, his baptism of fire and his official reception into the brotherhood of Cosa Nostra. The blessed time when it was all in the future, a time when he would have strangled with his bare hands anyone who had suggested that he would one day be a traitor.

  “Quintiliani thinks it’s a good idea, being a writer.”

  Tom Quintiliani, the old enemy who had nonetheless been responsible for the safety of the Blakes for the last six years, had given him the green light. They knew from experience that anyone living under guard would sooner or later attract the attention of the neighbours. Fred would need to justify some kind of sedentary activity to them.

  “I thought it was a good idea, until you actually started doing it, you shit!”

  The fact was that the whole neighbourhood now knew that an American writer had come to live amongst them in order to write a great masterpiece about the Normandy landings. Being known as the writer’s wife gave Maggie no pleasure. On the contrary, she felt that Fred’s deception would eventually bring nothing but trouble. Not to mention Belle and Warren who, when filling in their class registration forms, had left blank the space that said “parents’ profession.” They would have greatly preferred to tell their friends and the whole staff that their father was a model-maker, or the European correspondent of an American fishing magazine, anything that wouldn’t arouse any real curiosity. There was no doubt about it – their father’s sudden literary vocation was going to cause complications.

  “You might have thought of something more discreet,” Maggie said.

  “Like architect? Like in Cagnes? That was your brilliant idea. People kept asking me how to build swimming pools and pizza ovens.”

  They had had this conversation a thousand times, and a thousand times they had nearly come to blows. She held Fred responsible, with some justification, for the constant moving, for their inability to settle anywhere. Not content with having exiled them to Europe, Fred had managed to attract attention as soon as they had arrived in Paris. He had always been used to having wads of cash for everyday spending, and then he had decided that the protection programme wasn’t giving him enough to live decently. There he was, a top-class witness who had put away the top criminals, forced to live like a third-rate bag-carrier. Never mind. Since Quintiliani refused to increase his allowance, Fred had bought a huge deep freeze on credit, and filled it with luxury items bought with bouncing cheques, which he then resold to the neighbours. (He had managed to pass himself off in the building as a wholesaler in frozen goods who would retail lobsters at ultra-competitive prices.) His little trade had been so unforeseeable, and so unlikely, and so discreetly carried out, that the Feds had only found out about it when the bank started complaining. Tom Quintiliani, the great witness-protection pro, had been able to fend off all threats, head o
ff all possible connections with Mafia circles, and keep the Blake relocation secret, even from some of his own colleagues. He had foreseen everything. Except the comings and goings of shellfish in the Saint Fiacre building at 97 Rue Saint Fiacre, Paris 2.

  Tom had been hurt by such an odious betrayal of the protection programme. To take such risks when such exceptional measures had been set in place, when he was the only witness ever to have been relocated to Europe – that showed the full extent of Fred’s thoughtlessness and ingratitude. They had had to leave Paris for a small town on the Côte d’Azur. Fred, realizing that it had been a close shave, had finally calmed down.

  Three years later, the Blakes had at last managed to blend into the background. In Cagnes, the children had reached their previous scholastic level; Maggie was doing a correspondence course, and Fred was spending his afternoons on the beach, swimming in summer and walking in winter, alone apart from the distant presence of one of Quintiliani’s agents. During those long hours of solitude, he had mulled over all the stages that had brought him to this point, those twists and turns of fate which would, he thought, have made a good story. In the evenings he sometimes went down to a bar for a game of cards and a pastis with the locals.

  Until the fateful day of the pinochle game.

  That evening his card partners began talking about their lives, their small worries, but also their small professional successes: a raise, a free cruise, a promotion. They had had a bit to drink, and began to laugh at Fred the American architect’s silence; they started to gently tease him about his apparent idleness – the only things they had seen him build were sandcastles and card houses. Fred had taken all this without flinching, but his silence only encouraged the sarcastic remarks. Late in the evening, pushed to the limits, he had finally cracked. He, Fred, had never had to wait for good marks or raps on the knuckles from his bosses! He had built his own kingdom with his bare hands, and he was the absolute master! He had raised armies! He had made the mighty tremble! And he had loved his life, a life no one could understand, least of all these assholes in this dump of a bar!

  After his hurried departure for Normandy, a rumour went round the little quarter of Cagnes-sur-Mer that the American had gone home to get treatment for his nervous troubles.

  “Here, Maggie, they’ll leave me in peace. They leave writers in peace.”

  At that she left the room, slamming the door, with the firm intention of leaving him in peace until death.

  *

  Mme Lacarrière, the music teacher, regarded Miss Blake’s late arrival in her class as a miracle. Belle, unlike those who regarded her class as an opportunity to finish a maths exercise or read through an essay, took the lesson very seriously and joined in on everyone else’s behalf. She was the only one who knew major from minor, or that Bach came before Beethoven, or who could even sing in tune. The tragedy of Mme Lacarrière’s twelve-year teaching career had hitherto been that she had never found the pupil – the one who would have discovered music through her, who would have continued with the subject, who would have played and composed, and who would have made her role as a teacher, so often put into question, entirely worthwhile.

  “I say, Miss Blake . . .”

  All the teachers, disconcerted by the name Belle, preferred to address her as “Miss Blake.”

  “The lycée is organizing an end-of-term concert, with parents and graduates invited. I’m in charge of the choir, which is going to sing Haydn’s Stabat Mater. I would very much like it if you could join us.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “What?”

  “You can count me out!”

  She had given the same answer to the French teacher, who was putting on a sketch written by the pupils. Ditto to Mme Barbet, who was choreographing a modern dance tableau.

  “But . . . Think about it . . . Your parents will be there, I should think . . . And the mayor, and the local press . . .”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  Belle got up and walked out of the class, without permission, before the amazed stares of her classmates; she decided to go and work off her rage in the playground. The local press . . . Just thinking of Quintiliani’s reaction made her give an uncharacteristic groan. The witness-protection programme strictly forbade protected families from appearing in any photos or making any public appearances. Belle began to resent those who even suggested that she play any part in this damned end-of-term show.

  “You’re just being shy, Belle. Appearing in public might help! A lot of people have conquered their shyness by acting in plays.”

  Her, shy? She had the confidence of a film star! She was as bold as a saloon-bar singer! But she was forced to conceal the real reason for her refusal from those who were urging her to appear on stage: I’m not just a little idiot waiting to be begged – it’s just that I can’t show myself anywhere, the United States of America have forbidden me. Apparently I would be risking my life and my family’s life, and it’ll be like that for as long as I live.

  Still ten minutes till the lunch bell. Belle was getting impatient – she wanted to see Warren. He was the only one she could complain to, he who had long since given up complaining himself about this curse they lived under. She went back into the main building and sat down on the ground, opposite the classroom where her brother was having a history lesson.

  Since early childhood, Warren had had an annoying habit of picking and choosing his educational options. By carefully planning for his adult life he had made a certain number of choices, making it possible, in his view, to concentrate only on essentials. For him the only two subjects which deserved a little of his attention were history and geography. The first was out of respect for his origins, the second in order to defend his territory. He had always felt the need to understand how the world worked, and how it had been organized before he was born. Even back in Newark he had been curious about his background, his descent, the history of his history. Where had his family come from and why had it left Europe? How had America become the United States? Why did his Australian cousins have that weird accent? How come the Chinese had built Chinatowns all over the world? Why had the Russians now got their own Mafia? The more answers he could get, the better he would be able to run the empire he intended to reconquer. Other subjects? What other subjects? Grammar was for lawyers, maths was for accountants and gym was for bodyguards.

  The year’s curriculum included, amongst other things, a brief overview of international relations before the Second World War, and the main events of the War itself throughout Europe. That morning the teacher had described the rise of fascism in Italy and the way in which Mussolini had seized power.

  “The march on Rome took place in 1922, and Mussolini took over the government. In 1924, after the assassination of the socialist Matteotti, he became dictator. He installed a totalitarian state in Italy and, dreaming of a colonial empire built on the model of ancient Rome, sent troops off to conquer Ethiopia. When France and Great Britain condemned his African invasions, he drew closer to the German Führer. He supported Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War. He met with no more opposition until the end of the War. At the same time, in France . . .”

  History continued its march under the bored eyes of twenty pupils more interested in thoughts of the Friday lunch of fried fish. It was even warmer than the day before, one of those days when summer seems to have come early. Concerned with historical accuracy, Warren raised his hand.

  “And what do you make of Operation Striptease?”

  The word “striptease” at this unexpected moment made the class sit up, wide awake now. All saw it as a splendid and timely intervention – they expected no less from the little new boy who had managed to control boys three times his size.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said that Mussolini met with no opposition until the end of the War. What about Operation Striptease?”

 
The lunch bell rang, but everybody miraculously remained seated. Mr Morvan had no objection to learning something on his own subject from a pupil, and asked Warren to carry on.

  “I think I’m right in saying that the Americans planned to land in Sicily by 1943. At the time the CIA knew that the only anti-fascist force in the country was the Mafia. The boss was Don Calogero Vizzini, and he had sworn to kill the Duce. The Americans wanted him to take charge of the landings, but to get that to happen they had to get into Lucky Luciano’s good books, and he had just been sentenced to fifty years for tax evasion in the toughest prison in the United States.”

  Warren knew perfectly well what happened next, but he pretended to search his memory. Mr Morvan urged him on; he was both intrigued and amused. Warren wondered if he hadn’t gone too far.

  “They got him out of prison, put him in the uniform of a US army lieutenant and took him to Sicily in a submarine, with some Secret Service people. There they met Don Calò, who agreed to prepare the ground for landings three months from then.”

  He had hardly finished talking; several of his classmates rushed out, others asked questions, thrilled that a gangster could have played a part in helping the Allies. Warren claimed not to know any more; he may have had an interest in obscure corners of American history, but he preferred to pass over certain details in silence. When the boys asked him what had become of Luciano, Warren heard another question: could a criminal end up in the history books?

  “If you’re interested, there are plenty of Internet sites that tell the whole story,” he said, as he left the classroom.

  Mr Morvan called him back, and waited until the room was empty.

  “Is that your father?”

  “What do you mean, my father?”