Malavita (11 page)

And he slammed down the receiver, feeling humiliated. Given the up-to-the-minute technology at Caputo and Di Cicco's disposal, Quint's return call wouldn't take more than a minute, wherever he might be on the planet. In the past, in order to trap him and force him to confess, the FBI had used parabolic antennae, lasers, satellites, microphones that could fit inside a beauty spot, cameras in spectacle arms and hundreds of other gadgets that even James Bond scriptwriters had never thought of.

“Tell me Fred, have you gone mad?” Quint said.

“I didn't want to offend that nice fellow and make myself unpopular.”

“Unpopular? I wouldn't give much for your popularity if those people knew who you were, the great crook and murderer Giovanni Manzoni. You're not a writer, Fred, you're nothing more than a scumbag who's managed to save his skin, don't ever forget that.”

Fred and Tom had long ago run out of insults for one another, and these verbal jousts were mere formalities. The game they were really playing demanded great precision and constant inventiveness.

“There's one thing that completely escapes me,” Tom went on, “and that's how on earth you could take part in a debate of any sort. It's just not your thing.”

He was right, of course. A debate, an exchange of ideas? It was true, the words “exchange” and “ideas” could not have been more foreign to him. For Giovanni Manzoni, eloquence sprang from the business end of a crowbar, and dialectical satisfaction was generally best achieved through the sort of sophisticated arguments deployed by blow torches and electric drills. Fred would have been happy to have sent Alain Lemercier packing, if he hadn't brought up this story about “a writer whom everyone regards as a failure.” What could he say? Who else, for miles around, would be better placed than Fred to deal with such a subject? In order to become a writer, it wasn't enough to just write, you had to have genuine writer's problems. And these days Fred knew all there was to know about the sufferings of a man, alone in his lair, telling his story, searching for truths that are often too uncomfortable to be told.

“I'm going to watch the video of the film first, Tom, and I'll prepare lots of interesting things to say. And you can come along to the showing, I'll say you're a friend. In exchange, I promise to give a completely accurate picture of you in my memoirs.”

Quintiliani, taken aback by such a sneaky argument, just burst out laughing.

*

Maggie was not planning to come to either the film show or the debate. She had spent a long afternoon toiling over the administration at the
Secours Populaire
(processing donations, bringing the accounts up to date, planning ahead), and now she was busy working as a volunteer at a soup kitchen for eighty people in the refectory of the Evreux Technical Institute. She stood behind a counter of Formica tables, filling the plates of the hungry and wondering how much pea soup she would have to dole out before she had paid her debt to society. She felt like a Red Cross nurse on the battlefield, simultaneously serving and cooking, loading and unloading vans, greeting people and washing up, like an athlete trying to break some record. Indeed, for her, charitable work was like some sort of sporting discipline – you had to warm up, do the exercise, and then accelerate – and if you trained regularly enough, you could become a champion. When the refectory was finally empty, she had to admit it to herself: there was a certain pleasure to be had from giving one's all. Armed with a sponge, she attacked the empty containers with self-denying energy. She allowed her hands to be scratched, grazed, crushed and bruised. After all, there were famous precedents for this.

*

In the semi-darkness of the great room, the audience awaited Alain Lemercier's introductory speech. The fifty people, the core, who always turned up, whatever the programme, had become, in doing so, a true club. They would not have missed this ritual for anything, the sort of shared communion that you could no longer find elsewhere, as well as the emotion you could only feel in front of the big screen. And after it was over they were all the more appreciative of the return to reality and the after-show drinks. The simple act of leaving their cosy sitting rooms and TVs to go and watch a film had become, in their eyes, an act of defiance.

Thomas Quintiliani and Frederick Blake sat side by side at the back of the hall. They were finding it hard to conceal their emotions – one excitement, the other apprehension. The FBI man was dreading the prospect of his snitch having to undergo even the mildest of questioning. But at the same time he realized that Fred's insertion into the local community would be perceived as a good result by his superiors. In a perverse way, the fake respectability of this supposed writer was proof that he, Tom Quint, had succeeded in turning an ex-con into a respectable citizen, and in a country like France – in other words he had performed a miracle. Fred, for his part, had watched a video of the film several times in order to prepare for the debate, and he felt ready to expound the modest thesis he had prepared, and had prepared answers to all the questions he was bound to be asked. He had even planned to begin his presentation with a quote that Warren had found on the Internet: “Wives of writers will never understand that when they appear to be just looking out of the window, they're actually working.” This summed up, for him, the total incomprehension of his family for his work, and their insidious way of denigrating his status as an author. This evening, before his first official audience, he would take his revenge on all those who doubted the genuine nature of his calling. And Tom Quintiliani, his greatest enemy in the world, would be the only witness.

Lemercier had vanished into the projection room, and the film had not started; people were becoming impatient.

“Back home we would have shot the projectionist by now,” Fred whispered.

Tom, despite having spent a lifetime waiting for things, rather agreed. Lemercier reappeared, his arms raised in despair, and climbed onto the stage to make an announcement.

“My friends! The film library has made a mistake. The reels I've been sent are the wrong ones. It's not the first time it's happened . . .”

It was true – it happened about twice every year. Last November, Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate
had strayed into the boxes labelled
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Richard Fleischer, and a few months earlier, instead of an American documentary called
Punishment Park
, the club had had to make do with
The Return of the Pink Panther
. But it took more than this to unsettle Alain, who was able, with skilful juggling, to justify the change in the programme, and improvise a rough presentation, even finding connections between the films. This kind of recovery from mishap had become the master of ceremonies' speciality. Quint looked at Fred with a relieved smile.

“No point staying here. We might as well go home.”

Alain apologized profusely to his guest, and suggested making a date for another showing, while Fred, disappointed not to be appearing on stage, headed for the exit without a word. Tom suggested they go and have a drink in the town.

“At least stay for the film,” Alain said. “It's another American one, you won't have wasted a trip.”

Fred followed Quintiliani. He would calm his nerves with a couple of glasses of bourbon, annoy Tom with his spiel about the good old days, and they would go back to the Rue des Favorites like the close neighbours that they were.

“Do stay,” Lemercier insisted. “I'm sure you'll like the film, it's Martin Scorsese's
Goodfellas
, about the New York Mafia. You'll see, it's very funny and instructive.”

Fred suddenly froze, with one arm in his jacket sleeve. His face was expressionless.

As an officer in the FBI, Quintiliani had learned never to show surprise, and to face the unexpected coolly and methodically – he was the type of person who knew how to breathe with his stomach when the barrel of a .45 was suddenly pressed into the back of his neck. However, at this precise moment, and despite his usual aplomb in the face of new situations, he felt overcome by a simultaneous hot flush and an icy blast in his guts, and he broke into a sweat.

Fred betrayed himself with an evil smile.

“We're not in any great hurry, Tom . . .”

“I think we'd better go. Anyway, you've seen that film. What's the point of seeing it again?”

Like all mafiosi, Fred adored all the films in the
Godfather
series. They were the chronicles of their great history, they provided legitimacy, and enhanced their reputations in the eyes of the world. There was nothing the wise guys enjoyed more, when gathered together, than to recite lines of dialogue from the films to one another, even miming some of the scenes. Sometimes one of them would find himself alone in front of the screen, late at night, sobbing over the death of Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando. To them, all other Mafia films were totally ridiculous and full of inaccuracies, with their operetta killers and absurd costumes. Dozens of such inept films were made in America each year – they were anachronistic and grotesque, and deeply insulting for the members of the real families, who were not amused at seeing their image turned into caricature by Hollywood.

Until Martin Scorsese's
Goodfellas
came along.

Fred knew the film almost by heart, and he hated it for a thousand reasons. In it gangsters were reduced to what they really were: scum, whose only aim in life was to park in forbidden places, give the biggest fur coat to their wife and, above all, never to have to live the lives of those millions of idiots who get up each morning to earn a miserable crust, instead of sleeping late in a gold-plated bed. That was all a mafioso was, and
Goodfellas
told it like it was. Without the myth, all that was left was stupidity and cruelty. Giovanni Manzoni, Luca Cuozzo, Joe Franchini, Anthony De Biase, Anthony Parish and all the rest of the gang knew that henceforth their bad-boy aura had lost its shine for ever.

So why this film, this particular evening?

A coincidence? Just one more reversal? Another little episode to blame on human fallibility? Why not some other film, any film, from the thousands of possibilities?
La règle du jeu
?
Lawrence of Arabia
?
La grande vadrouille
?
Bitches on Heat
?
The Blood of Frankenstein
? Why
Goodfellas
, why this horribly accurate mirror-image of Fred's life?

“I'd be delighted to see it again,” he said to Lemercier, as he returned to his seat. “I don't know much about these gangster stories, but I'd be happy to try and answer a few questions during the discussion.”

The MC, happy to have saved the situation, went back to the projection room. Tom, feeling unusually angry, restrained an impulse to knock Fred to the ground. Fred savoured the anger like a fine liqueur; any opportunity to see Quint in such a state was a victory gained over his misfortunes. Fred now held in his hands a way of taking his own particular kind of revenge against a film that had deprived him of his image as an honourable bandit, and had branded him as nothing more than a stereotypical loser.

“Instead of getting cross, Tom, tell me if you've seen the film.”

Quintiliani was not a man who went in for leisure activities; he enjoyed neither fishing nor camping, and only took exercise in order to keep in shape. He spent his rare moments of leisure reading articles that were more or less relevant to his activities. The cinema? He had memories of drive-ins, where the film took second place to the girl on the back seat of the car, or films shown in breaks during his training, and, most of all, endless films of no interest watched on his many plane journeys. However, he had seen
Goodfellas
and all the other Mafia films, in the interests of research. He needed to know about the heroes of those he was tracking, to understand their language, and the in-jokes derived from the films.

“You really want to play this game?” he whispered in Fred's ear.

Fred understood Tom perfectly, and interpreted the question as:
You creep, Manzoni, if you play this trick on me, I'll make your life such hell, you'll wish you'd spent the rest of your life in jail
.

“It'll be a chance for you to ask me all the questions you've been wanting to ask all this time, and maybe today you'll get some answers. Surely that makes it worth the journey?”

A suggestion that Tom read as:
You can go fuck yourself, you fucking cop.

The lights went down, silence fell, and a white beam of light hit the screen.

*

Maggie parked the car in front of the house and waved at Vincent, who was smoking a cigarette at his window. As soon as she came into the living room she collapsed on the sofa with her eyes closed, still overcome by the sensation of having travelled through the looking glass. On her drive home, she had been unable to stop thinking of the room lent to the Newark branch of the Salvation Army, where every day tramps and homeless people would gather. Wooden tables and benches, and all those people sitting there for hours, battling against the winter cold, the boredom, the fear of the streets and, above all, hunger. She had looked through the filthy windows on occasions, at this goldfish bowl of misery, practically holding her nose just imagining the smell. She had several times wanted to go in to experience the dizzying sight of degradation, and what had stopped her was not fear of confronting such squalor, but the strange feeling that she was worse off than them in her own degradation. These filthy men and women had their own sort of dignity. Not her. By accepting the values and way of life of Giovanni Manzoni, she had renounced any kind of self-esteem. If the local hobos could have suspected that this fine lady in her fur coat felt that way, they would have been the ones to give her some charity.