Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘Bravo,’
said Sinico with a curt nod. ‘You’re starting to understand.’
‘All I understand is that I don’t understand a damn thing.’
‘You’d be surprised how many people don’t even understand that,
dottore.’
‘I still don’t see what any of this has to do with my apartment.’
‘Your apartment was a message.’
‘Saying what?’
Sinico laughed.
‘Have you ever sent flowers to a woman you wanted,
dottore?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘The offer of that apartment was a classic Mafia message. There were no overt strings attached, any more than you would enclose a card with those flowers saying, “Here are some roses, now let’s fuck.” These people are a lot more subtle than you seem to realize. From their point of view, all that matters is that they made an approach and that you responded. You’re in contact, in communication. And if they need you for something, they know where to reach you. It’s their apartment, after all.’
‘But why would they bother to go to all that trouble for me?’ Zen asked ingenuously. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with the DIA. I’m just a liaison officer, after all.’
Baccio Sinico smiled at him in a peculiar way.
‘Perhaps they don’t believe that that’s all you are.’
Zen opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.
‘In which case, we both got it wrong,’ he said at last. ‘They thought I was more important than I am, and I didn’t understand any of this business about the apartment until you explained it to me. So in that sense the message failed.’
‘Count your blessings,
dottore,’
said Sinico drily. ‘At least you’re still alive.’
Zen frowned at him.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Around here, when messages get confused or misunderstood, that can be a … What’s that phrase you see on computers? A “fatal error”.’
He was regarding Zen keenly.
‘I don’t know anything about computers,’ Zen said with a shrug.
Baccio Sinico nodded.
‘That’s probably a good thing. They can get you into all kinds of trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing.’
He patted Zen on the shoulder.
‘Take my advice. Forget all this nonsense and go off for a week or two to unwind. Have you ever been to Malta? It’s a fascinating place, the crossroads of the Mediterranean, any amount of history, and it takes no time at all to get there. You’ve been through hell,
dottore
. You need closure. Let the healing begin.’
Zen nodded distractedly
‘But what about Carla? I need to know the truth.’
‘Leave that to us,’ Baccio Sinico replied reassuringly. ‘We’ll take care of everything.’
‘Pack the truck with dynamite and park it in the centre of their village. A sixty-second fuse, and a second team to pick up the driver.’
‘No, let’s bomb Limina’s house in the village when he’s there at the weekend. We might be able to hire the Cessna that those upstarts down in Ragusa use to import drugs from Malta. I bet the pilot knows someone over there who could sell us some sort of bomb.’
‘Or a missile launcher. Park on a road above the village and loose off one of those wire-guided numbers.’
‘O,
ragazzi
, why piss around? In Russia, there are nuclear warheads on the market. The CIA is trying to buy them all up, but I’m sure our Russian friends could find us one. Fuck the village, let’s set it off in the centre of Catania! Wipe the place out, like when Etna erupted!’
Four men sat around the remains of a meal. The remains almost constituted a meal in themselves, for the food had hardly been touched. There was only one window, of frosted glass. Despite the heat, it was tightly closed. What air there was had been dyed a bluish grey by the innumerable cigarettes whose ash covered the floor. It must have been almost a hundred degrees in the room, but no one had broken sweat.
The men were all in their fifties, wearing open-neck shirts and heavy trousers. They were squat but hefty, with faces that were dense, compact and opaque. The one who had just spoken was notable above all for his hands, for which the rest of him seemed to function solely as a life-support system. They swooped, they fluttered, they dived and surged like a pair of birds repelling intruders on their territory.
The man sitting next to him had a collapsing, concave face, lined with wrinkles like a punctured balloon.
‘So you think we should nuke Catania, eh?’ he remarked in a sarcastic tone.
‘What have we got to lose? We’re fucked anyway.’
‘So are they, Nicolò.’
‘Yes, but we know it and they don’t. We’re on the way out anyway, so let’s go with a bang!’
One of the two men on the other side of the table struck the wooden surface with his fist. He had a muddled, crunched face, the features too closely grouped for its overall size.
‘Who says we’re on the way out?’ he shouted.
The fourth man, who sported an extraordinary white moustache and matching sideburns on his bronzed face, laid a hand on the speaker’s arm.
‘We all do, Calogero,’ he said.
‘I don’t say any such thing!’ was the furious response.
‘Yes, you do. You say it by your anger, by your violent gestures, by your shrill tone of voice. The only people who squander their time and energy like that are people who know that they’ve lost. And we have lost. We had our moment of mastery, but now it’s over. And the only way we can retain some measure of respect is to recognize that fact.’
There was a silence, broken by a slight metallic click.
‘I have a message from Binù.’
All four men turned to the person seated at the head of the table. She was a dumpy, crumpled figure in a shapeless black dress who had been knitting throughout the preceding discussion. Now she set down her needles. Despite her age, sex and appearance, she had the undivided and respectful attention of every man present.
‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’ asked the one called Calogero.
‘He told me not to. He said that he wanted to hear what each of you had to say He said it would reveal a lot about you.’
Each of the men lowered his eyes, trying desperately to remember just what he
had
said. One thing was certain: the woman would know. She could recall, word for word, what such-and-such or so-and-so had said under torture in the long hours before they were strangled in the house of horrors which the Corleone clan had owned in Palermo, back at the height of their glory Later, she would tell her husband what she had heard, and he would give the appropriate instructions.
‘And what did Binù say?’ the man called Nicolò dared to ask.
‘He said,
“Cui bono?”’
The men looked at each other in an apprehensive silence.
‘What dialect is that?’ one of them asked.
‘It’s called Latin,’ the woman went on, picking up her needles again. ‘It means, “Who stands to benefit?”’
There came a nervous guffaw.
‘I didn’t know Binù spoke Latin.’
‘He has a lot of time on his hands,’ the woman said to no one in particular. ‘He’s been reading. And thinking.’
‘Who stands to benefit from what?’ asked Nicolò.
The woman looked at him.
‘From taking our men and leaving them to die in the back of a refrigerated truck after hacking Lillo’s leg off with a chain-saw.’
‘That bastard Limina, of course!’
‘And what did he benefit?’
‘Revenge for his son’s death!’
The woman set her knitting needles down again with the same faint click.
‘But we didn’t kill Tonino Limina.’
‘Of course not. But they think we did.’
The woman reached into some invisible crevice in her garments. A sheet of paper appeared, which she scanned.
‘Bravi!’
she remarked with sullen irony. ‘So far you’ve said all the things that Binù said you would say. Now, here’s his question to you. Who did kill Tonino Limina?’
‘Our rivals in Palermo,’ the white-moustached man replied promptly. ‘The competition there is out to get us for things we’ve done in the past, and the easiest way is to set us up against the Limina family.’
‘Or maybe it’s one of the new enterprises,’ Calogero put in. ‘That nest of snakes in Ragusa for example. The result’s the same. We and the Catanesi exhaust ourselves in a continuing blood feud, and the third party takes advantage.’
‘Or the Third Level,’ the woman said quietly.
A long silence, broken only by the drumming fingers of the man with the restless hands.
‘Them?’
whispered Calogero at length. ‘But they’re finished. They don’t respond any more.’
‘Not to us, no. Because we’re finished, too.’
‘Who says so?’ was the aggressive response.
The woman pointed to the sheet of paper covered in fine, spidery writing.
‘He does. We’ve always been realists, he says. That’s been our strength. And the reality now is that we don’t count any more, except perhaps to be made use of.’
She’s talking like a man, the others all thought. They listened to her words as though to an oracular utterance by a sibyl, because they knew they must be true. Nothing but a knowledge of the truth, communicated through his mouthpiece by her fugitive husband, could have given this dumpy grandmother the absolute male authority she wielded as of right. As though to compensate, the men all started to chatter like women.
‘Maybe they did it themselves.’
‘Murdered their own child?’
‘Of course not! Someone else, of no account, but rigged to look as if it was Tonino.’
‘But through their lawyer they told that magistrate, the one who was just killed, that it wasn’t him.’
‘Since when does anyone tell judges the truth?’
‘Or lawyers, for that matter.’
‘But if it wasn’t Tonino, why did they hit back at us?’
‘Any excuse is good. We’ve seen it before on this island. East versus west. And we know the Messina crowd were in on this.’
‘Who cares why? Kill them all! Let God sort them out.’
‘Who else could have gone after that judge? No one else would dare to try an operation like that in their territory. Besides, no one else was interested. It was the Limina case she was investigating.’
‘I heard that she’d been pulled off that one.’
‘Officially?’
A cynical laugh.
‘Enough of this bullshit!’ shouted Calogero at last. ‘The simple fact is that they have killed five of our men, and if we want to maintain any respect at all, we’re going to have to get even.’
‘Right!’
‘OK!’
‘Let’s do it!’
‘And slowly, if possible. A bomb is too good for them!’
‘Perhaps we should have a word with those blacks that Ignazio was trading on the side before he fell down that mine-shaft. Someone told me that in Somalia they still use crucifixion as a form of execution. Maybe one of them knows how to do it.’
‘We should nail up Don Gaspà and that Rosario side by side.’
‘With a sign reading, “But where’s Christ?”’
All four men burst into laughter. The woman’s voice cut through the companionable male mirth.
‘Who do you mean by
them?’
‘The Liminas, of course!’ the elderly man replied, still intoxicated by the wave of testosterone-laden empathy, like back in the old days before all the men of the family had been killed or locked up in cold, remote prisons or forced into concealment in a series of ‘safe houses’, leaving this hag to run the clan by proxy.
The woman laid down her knitting and raised her eyes to the gathered men. She picked up the piece of paper lying before her.
‘“They are like children. Well-meaning, enthusiastic, and dumber than fuck.”
His
words.’
A shocked silence ensued. No one could contradict her, of course. Maybe they were his words, maybe they weren’t. Keep quiet, they were all thinking. And don’t look like you’re thinking, either. Bite your tongue, set your face, shut up and let someone else take the initiative.
‘“We’ve had our clan wars,”‘ the woman read on, ‘“and look where they’ve got us. The people who want to start that up again are no friends of ours, even if they claim to be. In the past, their motto was control and rule. Now it’s divide and rule. If they succeed in setting the clans at each others’ throats once again, they can do what they like with you, playing one side against the other and both ends against the middle.’“
She picked up her knitting, leaving them to digest this information. The elderly man at the other end of the table tapped his wineglass with one fingernail.
Too bad the Liminas don’t understand that,’ he said.
‘Then we must try to enlighten them,’ the woman replied without looking up.
‘Cut their fucking heads off,’ muttered Calogero. ‘That’ll enlighten those sons of whores soon enough!’
His outburst, designed to surf on a wave of male fellow-feeling, fell flat in a total silence. At length the man called Nicolò sniffed and spoke.
‘With all due respect,
signora
, how are we to do that? We sent our boys to Messina to explain that we weren’t responsible for the Tonino Limina killing, and to get them to explain that to their friends in Catania. We’ve seen the result. Now what are we supposed to do? Offer to come round to the house and suck their cocks?’
A subdued laugh greeted this welcome, stress-relieving vulgarity. It died away in the woman’s pointed and silent knitting-work. For several minutes no one dared to break it. Then the fourth man, who had not spoken since the beginning, lit another cigarette and coughed apologetically.
‘There might be a way,’ he said.
There were several wry smiles and exchanges of rolled eyes.
‘All right, Santino!’ the elderly man said at last. ‘Let’s hear your latest brainwave.’
The other man coughed again.
‘When that judge was killed …’
‘Nunziatella? Where does she come in? That business had nothing to do with us, you know that.’
‘Of course. But there was another woman in the car. According to the papers, she was the daughter of a policeman working in Catania. A certain Aurelio Zen.’