Authors: Michael Dibdin
There was no sign of Corinna at the restaurant, but Carla’s suitcase had arrived. She reclaimed it and toyed with a
cappuccino
for twenty minutes, then walked outside. By now it was eleven forty-five, just fifteen minutes from the time when she had been instructed to give up and go home. It was deliciously warm yet airy in the shade of the huge awning. The only sounds were the slushy static of the wavelets on the rocks, the occasional clank of pots and pans in the kitchens, and the subliminal growl of a helicopter circling somewhere overhead.
‘Signorina Arduini?’
It was a uniformed waiter, professionally deferential.
‘Yes?’
‘There is a phone call for you. This way, please.’
She followed the man across the lobby to a table with a telephone. The waiter dialled zero and passed the receiver to Carla.
‘Hello?’
‘Carla?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s me. Leave the hotel and turn left into Via San Leonarbello. At number sixty-three you’ll find a green Nissan. It’s unlocked. Follow the written instructions on the driver’s seat.’
The line went dead.
Via San Leonarbello turned out to be an alley of single-storey fishermen’s houses, most of which seemed to have been converted into holiday homes. Sure enough, a green Nissan saloon was parked outside number sixty-three. Carla glanced along the street, then opened the passenger door and got in. A piece of paper with writing lay on the driver’s seat.
KEYS IN GLOVE COMPARTMENT.
DRIVE TO END OF STREET, TURN LEFT.
STOP OPPOSITE SPAR GROCERY.
KEEP ENGINE RUNNING.
Carla sighed sourly. If she’d had any idea what was involved, she would never have agreed to accompany Corinna on this stupid weekend outing to Taormina. All this games-playing was beginning to get on her nerves. But it was too late to back out now. She put her suitcase in the back of the car, moved over to the driver’s seat and drove off.
The grocery store, one of the ubiquitous Spar chain, was easy enough to find, but there was no space to park anywhere on the narrow street. Carla drew up opposite the store, blasted the horn and consulted her watch. All right, Corinna, she thought. You’ve got sixty seconds exactly, then I dump the car and get the next bus back to Catania. She had laundry to do and several long-overdue letters to write, and there was the new Nanni Moretti film which she’d been meaning to see for some time. She’d loved
Caro Diario
, and even if this one wasn’t as good, the prospect of a few hours in an air-conditioned cinema was a powerful inducement.
The passenger door opened and Corinna Nunziatella got in, barely recognizable in a man’s suit, shirt and tie. Her face was obscured as before by her aviator sunglasses, while her cropped hair was almost invisible beneath a large straw hat.
‘Go!’ she said urgently
‘Go where?’
‘Just go! I’ll give you directions later.’
Carla put the Nissan in gear and drove to the end of the street.
‘Left here,’ Corinna Nunziatella told her. ‘Now right. Do a U-turn in the middle of the block, then right again at the lights. Run the red, there are no traffic police round here. Do you like my outfit?’
Carla smiled distractedly.
‘It’s, er … interesting.’
‘This car belongs to a friend. They have four altogether, so she won’t miss it. The hardest part was getting out of the house without my escort spotting me. Hence the disguise.’
‘Won’t it raise a few eyebrows at the hotel?’
Corinna laughed.
‘Not in Taormina! They’ve seen everything there. It’s always been a sort of extra-territorial enclave here in Sicily, a place where none of the usual rules apply. As long as your money holds out, no one cares what you do. Left here across the railway tracks, then sharp right and follow the signs to the motorway.’
She glanced playfully at Carla.
‘Anyway, I happen to think I look rather fetching, so there. And you? No problems?’
Carla swayed her head slowly from side to side, indicating that this was not precisely the case.
‘I was followed. But I’m pretty sure it was just some creep who lives with his mother and wanted to look at my legs. He was much too obvious to be a professional. Anyway, this old man who was out watching birds along the coast got rid of him for me.’
To Carla’s surprise, Corinna insisted on her recounting the entire story, detail by detail. The older woman’s face grew grimmer and grimmer.
‘A classic sacrifice,’ she remarked when Carla had finished. ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but this is not good news. It confirms that they’re on to you as well.’
‘Who are?’
‘That “creep” you say was following you, the conspicuous way he was dressed and acting was quite deliberate. With someone like me they would have been more subtle, but they knew you weren’t used to the rules of the game, so they went completely over the top. You were
meant
to spot him and become suspicious. That was the whole point. Then, at just the right psychological moment, along comes this chivalrous, inoffensive slightly tedious old-world gentleman who promptly rids you of your ostentatious tail. You’re naturally so grateful and relieved that you’re not going to suspect
him.’
‘But he wasn’t following me, Corinna!’
‘Didn’t you just tell me that he walked the whole way to Aci Trezza with you, and that you then asked him for directions to
I Ciclopi?’
‘Yes, but…’
‘Did you see him after that?’
‘No!’
‘He didn’t by any chance follow you to this car?’
‘Of course not! At least, I don’t think so. I didn’t see him.’
‘Are you sure?’
Carla did not answer. They drove along a dead-straight road between rows of tall palm trees, their trunks trimmed, rising on either side like exotically verdant telephone poles. Then a junction loomed ahead, marked by a large green arrow marked A18.
‘Turn right here on to the motorway,’ said Corinna. ‘Follow the signs to Messina.’
‘Messina? But I thought we were
‘I suggest that you concentrate on the driving and leave the thinking to me,
cara,’
Corinna remarked crisply.
Carla said nothing. After a few moments silence, Corinna sighed.
‘I’m sorry for snapping at you. I’ve been trying to work out what to do. If I went by the book, I’d cancel the whole outing right now.’
She glanced girlishly at Carla.
‘But I can’t. To give up the prospect of this gorgeous weekend with you, all because of some paranoid fears which I’ve almost certainly imagined …’
‘You mean this man who was supposed to have been following me?’
Corinna Nunziatella shook her head.
‘It’s not just that. That business yesterday for example. It’s obvious they were sending a message to me through you. Just to take one aspect of the thing, the Hotel Zagarella is a notorious symbol of Mafia power, built by Ignazio and Nino Salvo, cousins from one of the top families who later cornered the tax-collection monopoly for the whole island, thanks to their friends in the regional government. They became obscenely rich as a result, but the Zagarella was almost entirely financed by public money from the government’s
Cassa per il Mezzogiorno
fund, supposedly created to stimulate economic development in the south. And the hotel’s symbolic status was confirmed once and for all in 1979, when Giulio Andreotti, then prime minister, gave a speech at a rally there, surrounded by just about every high-ranking political
mafioso
in Palermo.’
They were on the motorway now, gliding north with the other traffic heading towards the Straits of Messina and the ferry crossing to the continent of Europe. Corinna Nunziatella lit a cigarette snatched from a rumpled pack on the dashboard.
‘So when I’m told that you’ve been invited to lunch at the Zagarella by three men who claimed to represent the regional government, and who made it quite clear that they were aware of our relationship,’ she continued, blasting out smoke, ‘I don’t have to be a genius to understand the intended message.’
‘Which is?’
“‘Be careful. We’ve got our eye on you. You’re alone, you can’t trust anyone, our people are everywhere. Take heed of this warning. Next time there may not be one.’“
‘And you think they really mean it?’
‘Of course they mean it! They killed Mino Pecorelli and Giuseppe Impastato and Pio Delia Torre. They killed Giorgio Ambrosio and Michele Sindona and Boris Giuliano and Emanuele Basile and General Dalla Chiesa and his wife. They killed Cesare Terranora and Rococo Chinnici and Ciaccio Montalto. They killed Falcone and Borsellino. And they killed my mother and hundreds more like her, maybe thousands …’
She opened the window and tossed out the half-smoked cigarette with a gesture of disgust.
‘Well, they’re not going to get me!’
Perturbed by the intensity of Corinna’s voice, Carla took her eyes off the traffic for a moment to glance at her companion.
‘How do you mean, they killed your mother? The other evening you told me that she was still alive.’
‘No, I didn’t. You asked, and I replied, “I suppose you could say that she’s alive.” She’s alive, but shut up in an institution. A private one, mind you, and relatively pleasant, but an asylum nevertheless. She finally cracked when my father was killed in a particularly unpleasant way by a rival clan. Since then she will only speak English. She babbles about taking the train down to London and making a new start.’
She broke off, shaking her head, and patted Carla’s left knee lightly.
‘I’m sorry to bore you with all this ghastly personal stuff,
cara
, but you can’t understand me without it. For better or for worse, it’s made me what I am. I realized very early on that nothing could be done without power. The only power open to me, as a Sicilian woman, was the power of the state institutions, so I decided to study law and join the judiciary. The Italian state isn’t as powerful as the Mafia, as we know to our cost, but the balance has already shifted a long way. We’re ahead at half-time, but the match is far from over. The important thing now is to make sure that they don’t try to change the rules. But I’ll carry on even if they do. It’s a personal commitment. The only way to defeat the patriarchal structure of
mafiosità
is to attack it through the medium of an equally patriarchal authority whose interests happen to be in conflict with those which destroyed my mother.’
She laughed suddenly, and turned to Carla.
‘And now I’ll shut up about the whole business for the rest of the weekend!’ she announced gaily. ‘The only things you’ll be able to get me to talk about are clothes and jewellery and shoes and food and office gossip and celebrity scandals. I shall have breakfast in bed and lunch by the pool and dinner in a fabulous fish restaurant I know down by the sea. In short, I plan to behave like the frivolous, trivial, shallow slut that I’ve always secretly wanted to be. What about you?’
Carla gave her a dazzling smile.
‘That sounds perfect. I’ll just try to keep up with you.’
‘There’s the Giardini turn-off,’ said Corinna, pointing to the signed exit. ‘We take the next one. It’s marked Taormina. Take it slowly. It gets quite steep and narrow once you’re off the
autostrada
. I hope you like the hotel.’
‘Have you stayed there before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alone?’
‘No, not alone. This exit coming up.’
Carla signalled her turn.
‘So do you do this sort of thing quite often?’ she asked.
‘Not nearly as often as I’d like. It’s a survival strategy. Sicily is a pressure cooker. It’s not that life here is really that dangerous. Arguably less so, in fact, for most people, than in Rome or Milan. It’s a process of attrition. You’re “on” the whole time, particularly if you’re a woman. Everything you do or don’t do is noted down and reported back. There’s literally no such thing as privacy. We don’t even have a word for it.’
Carla turned off on to a looping, heavily graded road which zigzagged laboriously uphill towards a perched town which was presumably Taormina. A motorcycle had turned off the motorway right behind her, and was now making aggressive but ineffectual attempts to overtake despite the steep gradient. The two men on it wore full-body leather suits with white and red stripes and seemed to be having an animated conversation over an intercom system built into their space-suit-type helmets.
‘And then there’s the insular mentality,’ Corinna was saying. ‘A sort of passive-aggressive provincialism. Rome is only an hour away by plane, but it might as well be on another planet. Even in Reggio di Calabria you breathe more easily. Seen from Palermo or Catania, the Straits of Messina look wider than the Atlantic. Nothing that happens over there is of any more than marginal significance, depending on the extent to which it might tip the balance of power here.’
At the bend ahead, the road widened to a point which would allow Carla room to let the leather-suited bikers pass. She slowed down and signalled her intention to pull over. The bright red Moto Guzzi at once revved up and started to overtake. As it drew alongside, the passenger on the pillion raised a cloth-wrapped bundle which he was holding on his knees. There was a loud banging noise, as though the engine was about to stall, and pieces of glass started flying around inside the car. Corinna turned to Carla, who was struggling to keep the car on the road despite the rash of pockmarks erupting across her chest and shoulders. The man on the motorcycle produced a rectangular package which he lobbed through the shattered side-window of the Nissan, as though returning some mislaid possession to its rightful owner, just as the car veered off to the left, running over the verge and continuing on its way through the olive grove on the vertiginous hillside, riding normally at first, despite the gradient, but eventually turning sideways and rolling over.
The explosion almost immediately afterwards destroyed a
centenario
olive tree which had been planted in July 1860 to commemorate Garibaldi’s decisive defeat of the Bourbon forces at the battle of Milazzo and the unification of Sicily with the nascent kingdom of Italy which soon ensued. But there was no one left in Taormina who recalled this fact and the tree had almost stopped cropping, so the incident was of no real importance.