Malavita (7 page)

At that precise moment, he was no longer acting a writer and playing to the gallery; he now felt that he had completed the very first stage of a job that might make sense of everything he had been through, everything he had suffered, and made others suffer.

“Go and see what your fucking father's doing!”

Belle ran up to the veranda, where she found Fred sitting still and silent, bent over the typewriter. For a moment she thought he was dead.

“Dad, we're waiting for you. Are you going to light the barbecue, or what?”

He emerged from his trance, and drew his daughter to him, hugging her in his arms. Writing that last page had drained him, and left him vulnerable, and for the first time in ages he drew a curious kind of comfort from the embrace of such innocence. They emerged, Fred beaming, with his arm around his proud daughter, and all heads turned towards them. He greeted his guests, apologized for being late, and said a few words to put everybody at their ease. He went over to the barbecue, where he was given a glass of Bordeaux, which he sipped delicately as he prepared the fire, surrounded by a handful of men there to lend their support. In three quarters of an hour, all the meats would be cooked and the rush would start.

Word had spread throughout the whole neighbourhood, and the freeloaders kept on coming – it was beginning to feel like a village fête. Lieutenants Di Cicco and Caputo rang Quintiliani on his mobile before taking any private initiative. The boss was on his way up the motorway from Paris and swore he'd be there within the half-hour. Meanwhile he instructed them to go over and join the gathering. So they abandoned their observation post and mingled with the guests – nobody paid any attention to them. In order to blend in, Richard grabbed a plate and started to eat, without the slightest embarrassment.

“Are we allowed to do that?”

“If you hang around like an idiot with your arms dangling, you're bound to get spotted.”

The argument was carried and Vincent elbowed his way towards the ziti.

Malavita, too, was tempted to make an appearance. She was curious about all the noise that was reaching her through the basement window. She appeared to think for a moment, sitting up, her eyes wide open, her tongue hanging out. But then she decided after all to go back to sleep, because all that noise could only mean something disagreeable.

The rest of the evening might have carried on in a peaceful and happy atmosphere, with nothing to disrupt it, if Fred hadn't suddenly started having regrets. About everything.

Five characters, all male, stood in a semicircle around the fire, their eyes fixed on the coals, which were refusing to light, despite the dry weather, despite the sophisticated equipment and all the efforts of the master of the house, who was, after all, an old hand when it came to barbecues.

“That's not the way to do it . . . You need more kindling, Mr Blake, you've put the coal on too soon.”

The speaker had a cap on his head and a beer in his hand. He lived two doors away, his wife had brought an olive loaf, and his children were running around the buffet screaming. Fred gave him a cold smile. Beside him the bachelor who ran the travel agency in the middle of the town took up the ball:

“That's not the way to do it. I never use coal at all, I do it like an open fire – it takes longer, but you get much better embers.”

“That's not the way to do it,” added an eminent local councillor. “You're using firelighters – they're poisonous, and that's no joke. And anyway, you can see it doesn't even work.”

Without realizing it, Fred was proving a universal truth, which goes like this: as soon as one idiot tries to light a fire somewhere, four others will gather round to tell him how to do it.

“We won't be eating that sausage before tomorrow at this rate,” the last one said, laughing, and he couldn't resist adding: “You'll never get anywhere with those bellows – I use an old hairdryer.”

Fred paused for a beat, rubbing his eyebrows, in the grip of a violent and mounting rage. At the most unexpected moments, Giovanni Manzoni, the worst man on earth, took over the body of Fred Blake, artist and local curiosity. When one of the five guys gathered around the fire took it upon himself to suggest that only a bit of white spirit could rescue things, Fred imagined him on his knees begging for mercy. And not just mercy – he was begging to be finished off, released from his pain. Giovanni had been in such situations several times in his life, and he could never forget the very particular moan of a man begging to be killed: a sort of long wail, rather like that of the professional mourning women in Sicily, a song whose notes he could pick out from thousands of others. It wouldn't have taken him more than five minutes to make this one sing that song – this big relaxed fellow with his arms crossed, standing only inches away, unaware of the fate being prepared for him. The local councillor, for his part, was suffering excruciating torture, crouched in his underwear inside a freezer, like Cassidy, the Irish boss of the fishmongers' union in New York. The local councillor was doing less well than Cassidy, who, with his head wedged against a pile of chicken breasts, had banged on the inside of the freezer for a good two hours before dying and finally ending the long wait for Corrado Motta and Giovanni, who had passed the time by playing cards on the lid of the freezer.

The man with the cap, unaware of the terrible tortures Fred was planning for him, continued:

“It'll never take, there must be some old ash in there.”

Fred delved far back into the past: he had been twenty-two when his boss had ordered him to make an example of Lou Pedone, a negotiator for the “five families,” who had allowed the Chinese triads to set up shop on Canal Street in exchange for a big wad of drug money. To carry out the vendetta, and in order to set an example, Giovanni had shown quite exceptional powers of imagination: Lou's head was found floating in the aquarium of the Silver Pagoda restaurant, on the corner of Mott and Canal. And the most extraordinary thing was that it took several hours for the customers to notice the glassy stare coming from inside the aquarium. Fred, who was now beginning to lose it and had started lighting hundreds of matches under scrunched-up paper, could see the man's head in the aquarium, with his ridiculous hat floating on the surface. But the ordeal was not over: another man, hitherto silent, grabbed the bellows and took over the whole situation without even consulting Fred, who had already had his virility cast into doubt that afternoon. This time it took a superhuman effort not to grab the miserable man by the hair, press his face onto the grill and stick a kebab skewer through one ear and out the other side.

“Well, well, Mr Blake, you're probably better at stringing together sentences than making fires. One can't be good at everything.”

A few steps away, Warren, still trapped in the conversation about American cooking, was asked a question on a subject he had never even thought about.

“So, what makes a genuine hamburger?”

“A genuine hamburger? What do you mean?”

“There must be an original recipe. Do you have to have ketchup? Pickles? Lettuce? Onions? Does the meat always have to be grilled? Do you bite into it, or do you open it up and use a knife and fork? What do you think?”

Warren didn't think anything, but said what came into his head.

“A true hamburger is fatty if you want it fatty, huge if you want a blowout, full of ketchup if you're not worried about diabetes, you put onions on if you don't mind your breath stinking and mix mustard in with the ketchup if you like the colour it makes, plus a salad leaf for the sake of irony. And if you feel like it you can add cheese, grilled bacon, lobster claws and marshmallows, and it'll be genuine American hamburger, because – us Americans, that's what we're like.”

Maggie, for her part, was acting her role admirably; this barbecue was nothing compared to some of the summit conferences she had had to organize on Fred's orders. Everything went through the wives, who passed the invitation on to their husbands and all concerned. A barbecue at the Manzonis was nothing less than a Mafia summit with chops on the side. Decisions were taken there that Maggie preferred not to know about. Twice she had even welcomed Don Mimino himself, the
capo di tutti i capi
, who never moved unless there was a war between the families. That afternoon there could be no problems, everything would have to take place according to a gentle ritual in an open and friendly atmosphere. She had to be more than just diplomatic, she had to use her sixth sense, keeping an eye on everything and making sure the men were able to carry out their business discreetly, business which might include sealing one of their own men's fate in a block of concrete. What could possibly worry her now, so many years later, here in the midst of these French guests who were so amused by their lapses in taste?

Meanwhile the coals had finally caught, putting an end to the sarcastic remarks. The steaks were cooking alongside the sausages, giving out such an appetising smell that the guests started gathering in larger and larger numbers, plates in hands, around the barbecue. Fred was gradually beginning to relax, happy to have lit his fire, despite all the bad will around him. The man with the hat had had a narrow escape; without knowing it he had been within a whisker of a death so hideous that it would have made the peaceful town of Cholong famous. He was even one of the first to taste the meat, and couldn't resist one more piece of advice:

“It's good, Monsieur Blake, but perhaps you should have waited until the embers were hotter before putting on the steaks.”

Fred had no choice now – the man with the stupid hat would have to die immediately and in front of everyone.

In New Jersey, the man with the stupid hat would not have survived more than two weeks, he would have been taught to hold his tongue from earliest childhood, or he would have had it cut off with a razor-sharp switchblade – the operation wouldn't have taken a minute. In New Jersey, faced with real bad men of the Giovanni Manzoni kind, the man with the stupid hat would have bitten back all his sly comments, and would have long since given up looking over his neighbour's shoulder purely in order to make tiresome suggestions. In New Jersey, if you had the answers to everything, you had to prove it on the spot, and idle commentators were a rare breed. Giovanni Manzoni grabbed a poker leaning against the grill, clutched it tightly, and waited for the man in the stupid hat to turn round so that he would see death coming as he was being hit full in the face.

And too bad if Fred brought everything down around him, if by killing this man he put his family in danger, too bad if he went back to prison for life. Too bad if, once in prison, his anonymity only lasted twenty-four hours and Don Mimino gave orders to liquidate him. Too bad if the whole Manzoni story got back into the headlines and if Maggie, Belle and Warren didn't survive the shame and the vengeance. The death and ruin of a family were as nothing compared to Fred's irresistible urge to silence for ever the man in the stupid hat.

Just at this precise moment a gentle hand landed on Fred's shoulder. He turned round, ready to hit anyone who stopped the attack.

Quintiliani had arrived. He was upright, strong and reassuring, with the look of a priest. He had seen Fred's temper rising, and it was something only he could control. He knew very well how to deal with that sort of rage – in fact some of his FBI colleagues saw it as his special gift. For Tommaso Quintiliani, it was not so much a gift as a matter of dealing with ancient demons. In the days when he had hung out with his gang of friends on Mulberry Street, a man's life was only worth what could be found in his pockets. If he hadn't been drawn into the ranks of the FBI by some innate good conscience, he would have joined those of the Cosa Nostra with the same steely determination.

“Give me a drink, Fred.”

Fred heaved a sigh of relief. The ghost of Giovanni Manzoni vanished like a bad dream and Frederick Blake, the American writer living in Normandy, reappeared.

“Come and try the sangria, Tom,” he said, dropping the poker.

*

The party had dragged on and Maggie was in bed, yawning, ready to drop off to sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow. Fred took his pyjamas off the chair by the bed, put them on, lay down next to his wife, kissed her on the forehead and switched off the bedside light. After a moment of silence, he gazed up at the ceiling and said:

“Thanks, Livia.”

He only used her real name when he felt he owed her. Within that thanks, there was a long unspoken sentence that went like this:
Thank you for not leaving me, despite everything you've been through, because you know that without you I wouldn't last long, and thank you too for . . .
lots of other things that he would rather not say out loud – saying thank you was, on the whole, beyond his strength. He sensed her dropping off to sleep, waited for a moment, and then got out of bed, put on his dressing gown, and crept down to the veranda like a burglar. All the exhaustion of the day had melted away. He sat down in front of the typewriter, turned on the light and reread the last lines of his chapter.

How I miss the town where I was born and where I won't die. I miss it all, the streets, the nights, my freedom, those friends who would cheerfully kiss you warmly on both cheeks one evening and just as happily put a bullet in your eye the next day. Yes, I can't understand why I even miss that lot. All I had to do was help myself, everything belonged to me. We were kings, and Newark was our kingdom.

The plumber had twice put off the appointment and Maggie had finally persuaded him, practically on her knees, to come by that morning. However, that same morning her long-awaited appointment in Evreux was finally confirmed. Fred was fed up at the thought of having to deal with a plumber on his own, and took refuge in the veranda.

“Leave the door open – it would be so stupid to miss him,” she said, as she left the house.

So he kept an ear out for the doorbell, and returned to his notes, which would eventually form a complete plan of the second, third and fourth chapters of his memoirs. They went roughly like this:

2.   The “
sciuscià
” years.

– My four years working with Jimmy.

– The greyhound stadium.

– The Schultz haulage company.

– The Pearl Street vegetable market.

– Profits reinvested in excavation business.

Description of people I worked with at the time: Curtis Brown, Ron Mayfield, the Pastroni brothers.

3.   The “
a faticare
” years

– The front company, Excavation Works and Partners, and its subsidiaries.

– The local girls at Bonito Square.

– The trip to Miami (non-interference pact and consequences).

Plus: Little Paulie, Mishka, Amedeo Sampiero.

4.   The Family years.

– Meeting Livia.

– Don Mimino.

– The Esteban contract.

– Loss of the East End.

Plus: Romana Marini, Ettore Junior, Cheap J.

He was in his stride now and felt ready to press on to the next chapters, but just then the doorbell rang, cutting him off in full flow – another reason to hate the miserable workman waiting behind the door. Fred began to miss the good old days, when he had been the hero of the New Jersey building unions. By bending and intimidating the biggest businesses in the area to fall in with his family's interests, Giovanni Manzoni had unintentionally advanced those of various unions, one of which was the plumbers'. As a result bathroom fittings and general upkeep at the Manzoni home in Newark were henceforth maintained to a standard worthy of the White House.

He let in a tall, rather portly man in threadbare jeans and a bleached sweatshirt, who set off to inspect the kitchen, leaving a trail of plaster dust behind him. Didier Fourcade could always, by a careful calculation of factors, assess the limits of a new client's technical knowledge.

“The lady said something about a problem with dirty water?”

Fred had to turn on several taps in order to convince him.

“Well, you're not the only ones round here.”

“What is it?”

“How long's it been like this?”

“Five or six weeks.”

“Some of the ones I've seen, it's been four or five months.”

“What is it?”

The man turned on the kitchen tap and let the brown water gush out.

“Can I see the cellar?”

Fred had dreaded hearing what he then heard as soon as the man set eyes on the pipes: a low whistle of horror, which said everything that could be said about the gravity of the situation, the amount of work needed, the irresponsibility of the owners, the danger involved in not taking action, the astronomical sums this action would cost and the general disastrousness of the situation. This low sound had been a part of his training, a moaning blood-curdling whistle, repeated if necessary. The client, racked with fear and guilt, would go to any lengths not to hear it again. For Didier Fourcade, this sound represented his monthly paycheque, a better car, his daughter's education.

The trouble was, Fred didn't like it when people tried to scare him. If he had one single gift, it was the ability to resist intimidation. Trying to frighten him was like trying to bite a rabid dog, or scratch a mad cat, or hit a fighting bear. And once he had been provoked, he feared neither humiliation, pain or even death.

“So what about this filthy water, then?” he said. His patience was running out.

“What about it, what about it . . . What can I tell you? It could be lots of things. See the state of these pipes? Completely rusty. You've let them go.”

“We only moved in two months ago!”

“Then you'd better complain to the previous owners, they've let the pipes get into this state, look at that . . .”

“What's got to be done?”

“My poor fellow! It all needs redoing. This plumbing must be more than a hundred years old.”

“Is that why the water's that colour?”

“Might be. Or it might be coming from outside, but that wouldn't be my job.”

Fred would have settled for very little, one hopeful word, one sincere smile, even an unkept promise. Anything rather than this abuse of power in the face of a helpless victim. Fred recognized that language all too well.

“So what are you going to do?” he said, in a last appeal to the plumber's goodwill.

“Well, I can't do much at the moment. I came because your lady seemed to be in trouble, but you can't say it's an emergency. I've got two jobs on at the moment, and they're a bit of a way away. And there's a flooding at Villers, they're waiting for me, can't be everywhere at once. Can't do everything myself.”

“. . .”

“Make another appointment. See about it with my wife – she deals with all that. That'll give you time to decide with yours whether you want to get things done properly here.”

He had done the main part of his job: you create anxiety, and then you walk away. Didier Fourcade planned to leave the unhappy man to himself, expecting any minute to hear those frantic pleas which always came as music to his ears. He started up the stairs, but Fred Blake, or rather Giovanni Manzoni this time, stopped him by slamming the cellar door, and reached for a hammer from the work bench.

*

During the ten o'clock break, bunches of children played as children do, full of long-pent-up energy, letting out long-repressed yells, excited by the sun and the prospect of the summer holidays. The little ones played at war, the bolder ones at love; the older ones, busy with their mobile phones, arranged their social lives. The noisy playground teemed with this vibrant mixture, and nobody, not even the teacher on duty, was the slightest bit suspicious about the curious gathering that was taking place in a corner of the playground shelter.

About ten boys of all ages were waiting patiently in front of a bench, sitting in a row along the white games line. Warren sat alone on the bench, his arms stretched along the back, with a rather tired and yet thoughtful expression. The only boy standing was the plaintiff, his arms crossed, gazing at the ground. The others waited their turn, listening to their comrade's complaints, as he chose his words with a mixture of embarrassment and concentration. He was only thirteen and had not yet learned how to complain, at least not like this.

“I tried to do well at first. I don't mind maths, and I even had quite good marks at the beginning of the year, but the teacher left, and then the new one came . . .”

Warren, slightly annoyed by the noise coming from the playground, sighed quietly, still paying attention. He nodded to the boy, encouraging him to continue.

“He hated me straight away. The others will tell you that's true. I was the punchbag for that creep. He'd put on a special nasty smile when he told me to come up to the blackboard . . . And scribbles in the margins to humiliate me . . . He once gave me two out of twenty, and he put:
could do better
, but with a question mark for me, not like for the others. And lots of other stuff like that, just to humiliate me. I've got them, I can show you!”

Warren waved off this suggestion.

“Dunno what he's got against me . . . I must remind him of someone . . . I even asked him once; I wanted to sort things out. And he punished me! He gave me twenty exercises to do over the weekend! Twenty! Stinking bastard! My mother even went to see him, so that he could explain, and the creep pretended there was nothing wrong. He twisted my mother round his little finger! And who do you think she's going to believe, him or me? So I really worked hard, kept my mouth shut, even when he insulted me . . . And then at the last class meeting he blew me up. You should have seen my mother's face when she saw the report . . . ‘We suggest he repeats the year' . . . I'm not going to start the third year again because of that prick!”

The words choked in his throat, with the cracked voice of innocence brought down by cruel injustice.

“I can see you're telling the truth,” Warren said. “But I don't see what I can do for you. What exactly do you want?”

“If I have to stay down, I'm going to kill myself. I'll never get over it. It's just too unfair. I want him to change his mind, and agree to let me go into fourth, that's all I ask. Just for him to change his mind, that's all.”

Warren raised his arms helplessly.

“Do you realize what you're asking? He's a teacher!”

“I know. And I'm ready to make some sacrifices. I demand justice, do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Help me, Warren.”

And he bowed his head in allegiance.

After a moment's thought, Warren said:

“We're quite far into the term, but I'll see what I can do. Don't go out for the next few days, except to come to school, spend your spare time with your family. I'll deal with the rest.”

The boy clenched his fists, holding back a gesture of triumph, beaming.

“Next!” shouted Warren.

A little boy with glasses got up and stood at the exact same spot as the previous one.

“What's your name?”

“Kevin, 2B.”

“You wanted to see me?”

“Someone's stolen the money my mother puts aside in the cupboard. I know who it was – it was my best friend. My parents think it's me. He says it wasn't him. My dad doesn't want to quarrel with his family, he says I'm a coward and I made it up. But I know it's true. I can't leave it like that.”

*

The writer's wife.
Maggie might have acquired a taste for the title if she hadn't for so long been known as the gangster's wife, married to the head of a family, a mafioso – Giovanni Manzoni, that snitch Giovanni Manzoni. After being married to all that, there was no way she could embark on a new role, especially that of a writer's wife. What made her incandescent with fury was the odious way Fred thought that he could somehow redeem himself by listing his crimes in black and white. Could there be any more perverse method of clearing one's conscience? Nor could she understand the relish with which he shut himself away on that stinking veranda, when, unlike the rest of his gang of thugs, he had never previously had any interests beyond his own position in the hierarchy at the heart of the Cosa Nostra. Some of the others liked fishing or sport, others bred dogs or tried to lose weight at the Turkish baths. Not him. His only hobby was finding new business ventures, new schemes to enable him to fleece new victims, who would only realize what had happened once it was too late. Why now, so many years later, did he have to feel this urge to shut himself away for eight hours at a time in front of a rotten old typewriter? Was he trying to give a new and cynical definition to the whole concept of confession? Or did he just want to relive his old battles, and make some claim to immortality? It was as though he was experiencing some sort of nostalgia for evil. He was dipping his pen into the darkness of his soul – and that ink would surely never run dry. The neighbourhood might have accepted this imposture without a murmur, but Maggie was not taken in.

She was ten minutes early, and parked the car in Rue Jules Guesde in Evreux. She lit a cigarette to pass the time, and tried to imagine how her husband would have jeered at her if she hadn't lied to him about where she was going.

“What are you trying to prove, my dear Maggie? You want to salve your conscience? Redeem your sins? Well, take it from me, I don't regret anything, and if things had gone differently we'd still be back there, with the family and all my team, and we'd be living just the same life, the life we were born to, instead of mouldering here, so let me tell you, it's a real hoot to see you playing the holy saint.”

The Eure branch of Secours Populaire is looking for a volunteer for administrative work.
A small ad in
Le Clairon de Cholong
. All that was needed was a bit of time, a bit of practical ability and plenty of motivation. Maggie felt she had been chosen. It couldn't have been the hand of God – she had turned her face away from him, and no longer believed in his mercy any more than in his anger. The ways of the Lord remained impenetrable, and the cruel pleasure He seemed to take in muddying the issues no longer fascinated her, it just left her weary. To have to always remain a mystery to human eyes must inevitably affect your motives. So much gravity, transcendence, excessiveness, eternity, and all in the most profound silence – well, Maggie just gave up. The truth was, and she could hardly bring herself to confess it, God simply didn't move her the way he used to – the crown of thorns, the Sistine Chapel, the White Lady, the great church organs, none of them had the effect on her that they had in the past. Nowadays the only real miracle which touched her heart could be summed up in one word, a word which covered so many others: solidarity. The phenomenon, for her, had made itself felt in the most mundane of circumstances, walking past a television set, or coming out of a film, or turning on the radio for some background noise. The first time had been seeing a television ad for an insurance company, which fearlessly proclaimed its high moral status and its mission to help others to a crescendo of violins; Maggie had felt tears welling up, idiotic real tears in front of the screen; she felt a fool for having been so taken in, but every time the ad came on, the same thing happened. And then there was the Hollywood film where the young man finds his true love thanks to the benevolence of an anonymous crowd; there, too, obvious strings were being pulled, and she wasn't proud of her reaction, but all the same it did make her heart beat faster. Every time she heard something on the news about groups of individuals uniting to help another, she felt a personal call. Gradually she began to analyse these feelings, identifying their components, until they mingled together: team spirit, appeals to public generosity, defence against injustice, empathy for one's fellow man, the list could go on for ever – it didn't matter, the most important thing was to serve the high ideal of solidarity, in so far as one could. It would be a way of showing God that men could do the job for themselves.