Badfellas (18 page)

Tom was determined to create a diversion so as to bring an end to this unbearable verbal diarrhoea, spewed out by a boastful ignoramus who was going to bring everything down around him. But what sort of diversion, for God’s sake? How was he going to get this bastard to shut his mouth?

One of the spectators managed this miracle by raising his hand.

“If there’s any message we get from the cinema about gangsters and mafiosi, it’s something to do with the idea of redemption. As though they’d been trying to atone somehow for the last thirty years.”

“Redemption? I don’t suppose most of those guys know what that word means. Honestly – have you really been taken in by all that crap? Why would a man who
has just blown out the brains of his best friend over some incident with a bookie feel the need to play Jesus Christ? Guilt – that’s a concept invented by intellectuals. Go and try it on Gigi Marelli, who was a fourteen-year-old executioner, a baby-killer as they used to call them. He was known as “Lampo”, the lightning bolt. He had an average of six or seven contracts a year, that kid, and two bodyguards who watched him day and night. One day he was given a special contract: his own father – he was asked to kill his own father. The old man had been stupid, and the
capo
at the time was insistent that the son should do the job. Once he’d done it, Gigi went and told his mother. They stood together, clutching each other at the funeral. Guilt? There’s a Greek tragedy taking place every day in Brooklyn and New Jersey, plenty of material for new plays and plenty of new theories for psychiatrists too.”

Quint grabbed his phone, called HQ and got Di Cicco.

“Go and wake Maggie up.”

“She’s here.”

“Let me talk to her.”

In the audience, twenty impatient hands were now raised. The jungle drums had beaten around the town, and the hall was filling up. Fred was glowing. His performance was that of an actor and a raconteur, a blend of thinly disguised confession and dramatic invention. This warm glow cleared his mind of the bitterness and sacrifice of the last few years.

“So to answer the question you put at the beginning, yes, you can see goodfellas in the street. You want names? James Alegretti, known as Jimmy the Monk, Vincent Alo, known as Jimmy Blue Eyes, Joseph Amato, known
as Black Jack, Donald Angelini, known as The Wizard of Odds, Alphonse Attardi, known as The Peacemaker…”

Tom dreaded the logical conclusion of this list, the inevitable moment when an exultant Fred, carried away by his own confession, would finally betray himself.

“…John Barbato, known as Johnny Sausages, Joseph Barboza, known as Joe the Animal, Gaetano Callahan, known as Cheesebox, William Cammisario, known as Willie the Rat…”

The very last person to come into the hall was Maggie. She walked slowly down the aisle without taking her eyes off the man on the stage, who reminded her of another man, a certain Giovanni with whom she had fallen in love a long time ago. Why him, why that rascal Manzoni who hung around with all the other hooligans? Nobody could answer that except her. She knew him by reputation and she had seen him for the first time at the San Gennaro dance on East Houston Street. She had watched him drinking with his mates and chasing skirt until late in the evening, when a handful of girls remained, all longing to be taken home by the handsome Giovanni. Instead he had asked Maria la Ciociara to dance; she was a plain young woman who had been a wallflower all evening. Seeing him taking the overcome girl in his arms had made Livia’s heart beat harder.

“Frank Caruso, known as Frankie the Bug, Eugene Ciasullo, known as The Animal, Joseph Cortese, known as Little Bozo, Frank Cucchiara, known as Frankie The Spoon, James De Mora, known as Machine Gun, and hundreds of others. Most didn’t wear the pinstripe suits and garish ties you might expect – you had to be a made guy to recognize another one. Otherwise you would just
take them to be decent family men coming home from a day’s work, which is what they were, really. And amongst all these, there’s one I want to make a special mention of, a clan boss from Newark, a really special guy. He was married to the sweetest of girls, and they had two lovely kids, a boy and a girl. I must tell you about this guy, the way he took to heart every single thing that happened on his territory…”

Fred suddenly caught Maggie’s eye, as she stood below the stage. There was nothing reproachful in her look, on the contrary she was gazing at him with indulgence. He stopped talking, smiled at her, and slowly woke up.

“Come on Fred, we’re going home.”

With this “come on Fred”, he felt her take his hand.

Like an old actor relishing applause, he bowed to his audience, who clapped wildly. Alain Lemercier understood that one of the greatest evenings of the cinema club had just taken place. His struggles had all been worthwhile.

Tom, Maggie and Fred walked home in silence in the dark. Quint, as he left them at their door, warned Fred:

“If this evening’s exhibition has any repercussions, I’m dropping you all, even if it means the FBI takes a hit for it. I’ll just have to live with the painful knowledge that I have facilitated your death instead of delaying it as long as possible, which is what I’ve been busting a gut doing for the last six years.”

Quintiliani would not have that pleasure. Fred’s pointless foolhardiness would never have any consequences. But the inhabitants of Cholong would long remember
this extraordinary performance, which they simply took to be the outpourings of a writer’s extra-fertile imagination.

Fred and Maggie didn’t speak until they reached their bedroom.

“So – you made a fine spectacle of yourself?”

“And you had a good time being lady bountiful with your starving people?”

She turned off the bedside light and he grabbed his toothbrush in the bathroom. A jet of dark-brown water splashed onto the white basin. Disgusted, he went back to his bedside table and picked up the telephone.

“Quintiliani, I want to apologize. I behaved like an idiot.”

“Nice to hear that, but I don’t believe a word of it.”

“I sometimes forget how hard you work.”

“You usually come up with this sort of crap when you’re trying to get something out of me. Do you really think this is the right moment?”

“I’ve got to tell you a story, Tom…”

“Wasn’t this evening’s performance enough for you?”

“A story about you.”

“Go on then.”

“Do you remember when Harvey Tucci couldn’t give evidence because he’d had his throat shot out by a hitman? You were part of the team supposed to be protecting him, Tom. Sorry to remind you of a painful moment. You were a new boy at the Bureau.”

“You were just a little squirt yourself, Fred. You were acting as cover for the hitman that evening, you told me about that.”

“What I didn’t tell you was that the shooter couldn’t get Tucci in his sights, after several hours. There was still
the possibility of icing one of your people to terrorize Tucci and persuade him not to make the deal.”

“…”

“It was your head that was in his sights, Tom.”

“Go on.”

“He asked me what he should do, and I answered, ‘No collateral damage.’ We waited for another ten minutes, which seemed to go on for ever, and then that fool Tucci went to smoke a cigarette at his bedroom window.”

“…”

“Pretty close, eh?”

“Why are you telling me all this now?”

“This evening got me down. I need to talk to the only family member I’ve got left back there.”

“Your nephew Ben?”

“Do me a favour, I need to know how he is.”

“One suspicious word and I cut you off.”

“There won’t be any. Thanks, Tom.”

“By the way, you never said who the hitman was. Was it Art Lefty? Franck Rosello? Auggie Campania? Which one was it?”

“Don’t you think I’ve done enough snitching?”

Ten minutes later, the telephone rang, and woke Maggie up. She had only just dropped off.

“Hello?”

“Ben? It’s Fred.”

“Fred? What Fred?”

“Fred, your uncle from Newark, who lives a long way away.”

Ben, at the other end, realized that it was his uncle Giovanni ringing from God knows where on the planet, and that the conversation was being tapped.

“You OK, Ben?”

“Fine, Fred.”

“I was remembering that weekend in Orlando, with the children.”

“I remember.”

“We had such a great time. I think we even went to see Holiday on Ice.”

“We did.”

“Hope we can do that again one day.”

“Me too.”

“You know what I miss most? It’s a good bagel from the Deli in Park Lane, my favourite, with pastrami, fried onions, raw onions and those funny sweet peppers. And some pepper vodka.”

“There are two different sorts, the red and the white.”

“The red.”

“That’s the best one.”

“Apart from that, everything OK, Ben? Anything particular to tell me?”

“No. Oh yes, I kept your cassettes. All your Bogarts.”

“Even
Dead End
?”

“Yes.”

“Keep them. Do you still go to the races?”

“Of course.”

“Well, next time, in memory of your old uncle, play eighteen, twenty-one and three for me.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Big kiss, my boy.”

“Me too.”

Fred hung up, and turned to Maggie.

“My nephew Ben is coming in two or three days to spend a weekend with us.”

“How does he know the address?”

“I’ve just given it to him.”

“You’ve just given him the address?”

“Yes, I’ve just given him the address.”

“Quintiliani’s going to kill you.”

“It’s done, he’ll just have to shut up.”

“Hey, Gianni, is that story about ‘collateral damage’ true?”

“Yes.”

They switched out their lights at the same time. The day was ending as it had begun, with a transatlantic telephone call.

“Ben can make us his polenta with crayfish,” she said. “The kids’ll be pleased.”

Fred didn’t go down to the veranda that night. Maggie snuggled up in her husband’s arms and they went to sleep straight away.

Sandrine Massart stood silently in her dressing gown, with her arms crossed, watching her husband preparing for his trip to the Far East. For Philippe, nothing was more delightful than this series of studied little movements, refined over the months: packing the laptop into its black canvas case, picking out shirts according to carefully worked-out parameters, checking the weather in South-East Asia on the Internet, wrapping up the Hermes squares to give to his clients, not forgetting a book that wouldn’t be read, something connected to his destination. The simple act of changing the batteries on his Walkman, or clipping his vaccination certificate to his passport, gave him the added satisfaction of knowing the departure was imminent. Sandrine was resigned to him going away so often, but she resented the fact that he was unable to hide his happiness at leaving the house. At these moments, Philippe felt he was already in transit, far from the house in Cholong, nearly there – there, meaning anywhere else.

They had got married fourteen years earlier in Paris, where he had just landed an office job in a sewing-machine factory and where she was finishing her law degree. Two years later, Philippe was offered a position as sales manager for a new company starting up in the Eure, just at the moment when Sandrine had the chance to join a law firm specializing in employment law: a choice had to be made. Little Alexandrine was
about to arrive, and so Sandrine didn’t feel too bad about abandoning the bar and the robes and moving the family to Cholong so that her executive husband could pursue his career.

“It’s just a matter of three or four years, darling. Maybe you can find a law firm in the area?”

But she couldn’t find anything in the area, and once Timothée was born, she gave up the whole idea. She never regretted her decision for a moment; giving up her career for such a good reason wasn’t a real sacrifice. Sandrine found a new kind of happiness in this big house which would shelter them all for ever.

Until the day a French engineer in her husband’s company invented a crafty process which knocked twenty or thirty seconds off the assembly of the zip fastenings, and which, by saving time and manpower, could be worth huge sums to the manufacturing industry.

Most of the Asian countries had bought the patent, and the brilliant Philippe Massart was given the job of finding new markets all over the world. Unable to delegate, Philippe was in the habit of personally finalizing each contract. And so these days he went away three or four times a month for stays of three full days in each place, sometimes more if he decided to combine two destinations reachable in less than three flights. What Sandrine found worse than the absences were the effects of the jet lag, which lasted just long enough to meet up between journeys.

That morning he was leaving for Bangkok, to finalize an agreement which would allow his company to invest with the manufacturer himself, opening up new sectors – in other words the culmination of a long-term strategy that would promote him in the hierarchy without the
slightest risk of demotion, and thus the preparations for this departure felt even more delightful than usual. Watching all this, Sandrine felt only silent resignation at the thought of the sad outcome of their common story.