Malavita (12 page)

*

When the credits had finished rolling, Lemercier came back onto the stage and took the microphone to make a few general remarks about the film and its director. Before asking for comments from those who had something to say, he turned to Fred and invited him to join him. There was some encouraging applause and, as usual, Alain asked the first question.

“When you're living in New York, are you aware of the presence of the Mafia, as shown in films?”

Tom, with a reflex gesture which betrayed his anxiety, reached for his holster.

“The presence of the Mafia?” Fred repeated.

He didn't really understand the question. It was too abstract, it was like asking if he was aware of the sky above his head or the earth beneath his feet. He sat dumbly in front of the microphone, feeling ridiculous, and took refuge in silent thought.

The presence of the Mafia.

Alain interpreted his silence as shyness due to the language barrier, and came to his aid.

“Might one see guys in the street like those three gangsters in the film?”

With this question, Fred caught a glimpse of the immense chasm which separated him eternally from the rest of humanity, the part that remains on the right side of the law. Gangsters fascinated honest people, but only in the role of fairground monsters.

Quintiliani almost raised his hand to say something. Not to put an end to this charade, but to come to the poor fellow's rescue. It was very well being clever alone on your veranda, telling your particular form of truth with an old typewriter, all very fine . . . But to speak for your life as a gangster on stage, holding a microphone, in front of fifty people – it was like going before the grand jury again. Fred was like a schoolboy, all excited about reciting his poem in public, who can't even remember his own name once he's up in front of the blackboard.

There were low mutterings in the audience, and a feeling of awkwardness. Alain tried to think of some quip to offer support.
Might one see guys like that in the streets?
How could one answer a question like that, which seemed so harmless, but was in fact so brutal? Faced with all the stares, Fred was tempted to lie, to claim that the criminals were invisible, and melted into the background like chameleons; he could even question their very existence, suggest that they were a scriptwriter's invention, like zombies or vampires. And then he could have made his farewells and fled back to his veranda, swearing to himself that he would never re-emerge. But in the name of the very truth that he was trying to discover by writing his memoirs, he felt he did not have the right to run away.

“At the start of the film, in the first scene in the bar, there's a guy who crosses the screen holding a glass, you don't get told his name, he's wearing a grey waistcoat over a yellow shirt with rolled-up sleeves. That man really existed, his name was Vinnie Caprese, he was a regular on Hester Street at a coffee shop called Caffe Trombetta. He would have a strong espresso there every morning, like he'd done since he was eight. His mother used to make one for him before he went off to school, no bread and butter, nothing else, and the kid would go off like that after gulping down his espresso – sometimes if it was very cold she'd put a drop of Marsala in it to warm his belly. I've always thought that that sort of thing is what makes people into executioners. Just details like that.”

*

Despite her exhaustion, Maggie couldn't get to sleep. She picked up the phone and suggested an evening visit to the G-men, who welcomed this unexpected distraction. Di Cicco got out three glasses for the grappa Maggie brought with her. She went over to the binoculars mounted on the tripod and pointed them towards the apartments that were still lit. Without the slightest mocking voyeurism or ill will, Maggie was now in the habit of watching the neighbours several times a week under the intrigued gaze of the two federal agents. The sample of humanity in the Favorites district was now her private laboratory – spying was her new science. If Fred regarded humanity as a grey and distant entity, Maggie refused to believe in the apparent banality of her neighbours' lives.

“What is it that amuses you in all this, Maggie?”

“Nothing amuses me, but everything interests me. When I was young, I used to spend my time putting people into categories, labelled with one function – one name was enough. Now the idea that everybody is in some way exceptional helps me to understand how the world works.”

She pointed her binoculars towards the little three-storey building at number 15, where four families and two single people lived.

“The Pradels are watching TV,” she said.

“She suffers from insomnia, it sometimes stays on till four or five,” Caputo said, sipping his drink.

“I wonder if he's got a mistress,” she said.

“How did you guess, Maggie?”

“I can sense it.”

“She's called Christine Laforgue, medical assistant, thirty-one years old.”

“Does the wife know?”

“She doesn't suspect anything. Christine Laforgue and her husband came to dinner there the other night.”

“What a pig!”

This had been a frequent
cri de coeur
in the past, at the time when Giovanni and his acolytes had had “official” mistresses. They would parade them on their arms in selected places, to such a point that the wives would try and meet them in person, hoping to scratch out their eyes. Since then adultery had been very high on her list of deadly sins.

Maggie then looked up to the top flat, where there was no light.

“Has Patrick Roux gone out?”

“No. He set off on his tour of France yesterday,” Di Cicco replied.

Maggie, like an entomologist, observed the evolution of her subjects, and their interactions. Occasionally she intervened directly in order to precipitate some development in their lives.

Patrick Roux was fifty-one, divorced, and worked as a bursar in a private school. He had just taken an unpaid sabbatical in order to fulfil a long-held dream – to criss-cross the country on his beautiful 900cc motorbike. Knowing that bikers were much in demand for this purpose, Maggie had persuaded him to carry an organ-donor card in his wallet. Roux thought that this would bring him luck, and in any case he had no objection to the thought of his heart beating in another man's body.

“I've got something here that might interest you, Maggie,” Caputo said. “It's about the little old lady at number eleven, who looks as though she'd go straight to heaven, the one who lives with her daughter and son-in-law. Well, back in 1971, she poisoned an old neighbour's dog. He never got over it and followed the animal soon after. It was a perfect crime.”

“And nobody ever knew?”

“She talked about it yesterday to a friend in Argentan. I suppose she wanted to confess to someone before facing her maker.”

God . . . Where had He got to? Maggie felt that by observing her neighbours so closely, she was doing the work that He should have been doing for his own creatures: watching over them and sometimes showing them the right way.

“Mr Vuillemin's light is still on,” she said, surprised. “He's supposed to be getting up in less than three hours. . . .”

This was the baker in the avenue de la Gare, who had lost half his business since the arrival of a young competitor. Like the others, Maggie had gone and bought a baguette from the new man, and had had the courage to give Mr Vuillemin her verdict in person: “His bread is much better.” How could this be possible? Nobody had ever complained about his bread for more than twenty years. It was no more or less spongy than any other, no whiter, it stayed fresh for the same length of time, so what was it? To find out, he had tasted it too. And looking at his dough, he wondered, with a sudden burst of nostalgia, where he had gone wrong along the way. And then he had decided to set to work and show this callow youth what he was made of.

Maggie couldn't bear to miss a single detail of all these human stories unfolding every day outside her door.

*

“. . . Bill Clunan learned Italian in order to become a gangster. You can picture the type, both parents Irish – he studied books of Eyetie slang, ate every day at Spagho, practised swearing, even Catholic that he was, that must have stuck in his gullet, having to blaspheme like the Italians, calling the Virgin Mary a whore, that was the hardest thing, but what can you do, he wanted to join Fat Willy's gang rather than any Irish one. If you ever go to Brooklyn and you're on Mellow Boulevard around seven, you might see him; he's got long grey hair brushed back, Ray-Bans on his nose, he'll be playing Scopa with his mates, who still call him Paddy.”

Tom, mortified, was desperately trying to think of a way of shutting him up. The simplest method would have been a bullet between the eyes, to put an end once and for all to this Calvary Manzoni had put him through ever since their paths had crossed.

“Who's this Fat Willy you mentioned?” a woman's voice asked.

“Fat Willy? What can I say about Fat Willy? . . .”

No! Not Fat Willy!
Tom tried to convey his thought. But Fred was only aware of his own excitement.

“Fat Willy was a
capo
, a boss, a bit like the Paulie character in the film you've just seen. His place in the hierarchy didn't matter much, Fat Willy just hated injustice. He could shed a tear when you told him your troubles, but he would also feel quite justified in smothering you if you had trimmed a bit of his profit. You could talk to him about anything, except his weight – nobody knew exactly what it was, they just said Fat Willy was a
pezzo da novanta
, somebody of more than two hundred pounds – it was the name they used for all the big cheeses, the gang leaders. He was so impressive physically that when he walked down the street it was as though he was guarding his own bodyguards. It was in nobody's interest to refer to his weight – not his sons, not his lieutenants, no one. You just had to tap his stomach and say ‘Hey you're looking well, Willy!' – you could be sure those would be your last words.”

Tom, horrified, nearly got up to intervene. Fred hadn't mentioned that Fat Willy was one of the first snitches to be taken care of by the FBI and the Witness Protection Programme. In order to make him unrecognizable, the FBI had placed him on a draconian diet and he had shed dozens of pounds. The first time he had been allowed into town, Fat Willy, or Guglielmo Quatrini as he was really called, had dived into a doughnut shop and eaten the equivalent of what he had shed.

“Willy just beamed at life,” Fred continued. “He was always agreeable, always in a good mood, he always had a friendly word for the ladies, and a kiss for the babies' cheeks, always happy. He only stopped smiling once, and that was when one of his sons was kidnapped. The kidnappers had demanded an enormous ransom, but Willy had held out, right up to the end, when he had received one of the boy's fingertips in a dental floss box. He not only got his son back alive, he got his hands on the kidnappers. He shut himself up in his basement with them, with bare hands. Yes, believe it or not, bare hands! Well, no one knows what happened then, all I can say is the neighbour had to go away for the weekend to get away from the screams coming from Willy's basement.”

The fifty people in the audience sat like frozen statues, hanging on the words of this man on the stage. A tremor of amazement passed amongst them, and nobody dared move or say a thing. All the rest, the discussion, the programme, all forgotten. One man was talking and they had to listen.

One spectator tiptoed out and went to ring his wife, who was down the road attending a meeting of the Green Party candidates for the next local elections. Basically, he told her to get over to the cinema club, as “something” was happening. She looked at her watch and suggested to the gathering that they might all go and see what was going on at the town hall.

*

Maggie, now tired of looking through the binoculars, was sitting at the listening table, wearing earphones, absorbed in her neighbour's conversations. She had just learned that Mr Dumont, the motorbike repair man, had been taking Chinese lessons for the last ten years for no apparent reason, and that his wife wasn't really his wife but his cousin, that the unmarried mother at number 18 went and put flowers on Flaubert's tomb in Rouen every month, that the French teacher lived well beyond his means, and won fortunes playing tarot in the back room of the only nightclub in the area, that Mme Volkovitch had knocked ten years off her real age in her dealings with officialdom, and that Myriam, at number 14, spent all her spare time searching for her real father so as, in her words, “to force him to admit to his paternity.”

During each of these sessions, she learned a little more about human nature, what motivated and moved people, what made them suffer – more than she could ever glean from any book or newspaper article.

“It's that young computer guy who's placing the small ads in the
Clairon de Cholong
,” she said, taking off her earphones.

Giving away PC XT computer, 14" screen with jet printer in good condition.
Obsolete equipment for which he could get nothing second-hand, but which could be very welcome to someone with no money. That was the sort of thing which thrilled Maggie the most, simple acts of kindness, small thoughts for others. If she felt drawn to the great humanitarian causes, she still had a lot to learn about such discreet and well-judged actions, inspired as much by common sense as good fellowship. Such actions often took the most unexpected forms. For example, her neighbour, Maurice, who owned La Poterne, the other big café in Cholong, had been on holiday in Naples, where he had come across an ancient custom still practised in some of the bars over there. Given the price of an espresso taken at the counter (a matter of centimes), you would often see customers getting rid of their small change and paying for two coffees, and only drinking one themselves; the barman would chalk it up and give a free coffee to some indigent passer-by. Maurice, who wasn't a particularly generous man, and who didn't give much thought to any poverty around him, had nonetheless found the idea interesting, and had introduced it. He was the first to be surprised at how many customers played the game. And Maggie had made Maurice into one of her real-life heroes, for having introduced a custom that went against all the expectations of the times, and one you would have thought bound to fail.