Malavita (17 page)

“I didn't think alcohol was allowed in jail.”

“The only thing that's not allowed where he is, is credit. Anyway, he's part of the scenery there, they practically allow him to go out to buy his packet of tobacco. He plays cards with the guards, plays the mediator when there's a fight, he's always been a good spokesman. He says it's not a good example to follow.”

As he talked, Stu went on packing the bottles in the box, wrapping each one in a cylinder of corrugated cardboard for protection. Failing that, a magazine rolled round a bottle did just as well. He picked up the 1972
Playboy
to wrap the last of the six, and was stopped by Donny's horrified cry.

“Linda Mae!”

And holding his beloved against his heart, he made a momentous decision:

“Whether you help me or not, Stu, I'm going to find her. And I'll tell her what she means to me.”

“Technically she could be your grandma.”

Stu picked up the other magazine lying on the table and tried to read the title

“The what . . .
Gazette
? . . . What language is this crap?”

“God knows, you find everything in those containers.”

Stu didn't enquire any further and rolled the
Jules Vallès Gazette
around the black liqueur, which was now perfectly wedged in with the five others. He stuck the address onto the box: James Thomas Centre, 14 Hazen Street, Rikers Island, NY 11370, and made two string handles for easy carrying – he'd been doing this for a while.

“Supposing you find her one day, what are you going to say to her, your Miss May 1972?”

Donny thought for a while before answering:

“That I still believe in her.”

*

Rikers Island, the largest prison in Manhattan, New York, was home to seventeen thousand inmates, men and women, scattered throughout ten separate buildings. The island was a sort of state within a state, less than six miles from the Empire State Building, and it was the largest penal institution in the world. The preserve of the senior inhabitants could be found, well away from the others, in a building called the James Thomas Centre, in honour of the first African American prison guard. On this Mount Olympus of the underworld, there reigned several living legends of crime, major figures from the Mob, the last of the great mythical outlaws whom the public had never tired of hearing about. Each of them was serving sentences of up to four hundred years, long enough to die behind bars, be born and die again several times over. In order to be a member of this exclusive long-sentence club, you had to have been sent down for a minimum of two hundred and fifty years without parole.

And so it was that in this senior preserve, time was perceived differently to anywhere else.

These twenty inmates lived in exceptionally comfortable conditions; they were famous, and mostly rich; they had the sort of lawyers you would associate with the largest of trust funds, and their good relationship with the authorities had transformed their status into that of permanent residents rather than prisoners, and their cells into apartments comparable with the best to be found in central Manhattan. They would all die there some day, but none of them were in a particular hurry to do so.

That afternoon, two of the residents, who had been friends for four years (in their timescale, just time for a handshake), were sitting and chatting in their armchairs, smoking the ritual post-prandial cigar. The younger man, who had nonetheless been there longest, was the terrorist Erwan Dougherty; he had invited his neighbour opposite, Don Mimino, who was twenty years older than him, the godfather of all the godfathers of the Italian Mafia, who had been incarcerated for six years. Erwan was very cautious about all contact with others – he had remained in total silence for nearly eight years – and liked Don Mimino for his old-world manners, and his philosophy of life, which seemed to come from another era, as well as the quality of his conversation, which was only equalled by the quality of his silences. For the venerable Italian, the Irishman's value lay in the fact that he was the only other Catholic in the building.

“I've decided to learn my native language,” announced Don Mimino.

“What do you mean?”

“I speak a sort of Sicilian dialect that was incomprehensible even in the next village. You only hear it nowadays in some parts of New Jersey! What I want to learn is the
lingua madre
, the language they speak in Siena. I want to be able to read Dante in the original. They say it's great stuff. I've worked out that if I take a course in medieval Italian, I should be able to get through the
Divina Commedia
within five or six years.”

In the senior preserve, embarking on long courses of study was desirable for many reasons; most of them saw it as a better way of passing the time than exercise or television. But it wasn't just that.

“Then I'll move on to English,” he continued. “I've lived here for sixty years, and all I can talk is a mixture of immigrant patois and street slang, and I'm not proud of that. My ambition is to read
Moby Dick
without having to look up words at every page.”

It wasn't just a matter of killing time, it was a way of finding a meaning, or even several, to this sentence which defied any understanding. How could you envisage the next three hundred years without some kind of purpose?

“I started late with Melville,” Erwan said. “When I got here, I first of all read the whole of Conrad and the whole of Dickens, then the whole of Joyce – he was from Dublin, like my parents. Then I started on a law course which took me eight years.”

Law was the most popular choice, followed by psychology, with literature a poor third. Some wanted to explore the workings of the legal code, discover hidden meanings and traps, and fully grasp the details of what exactly had caused them to end up on this island. Erwan, for example, had passed his bar exams so as to reopen his file and conduct his own defence. Psychology and allied subjects were also much in demand, anything concerning the mechanism of the human mind, starting with their own – indeed some simply went straight into analysis – this in order to put the troubles of the past in their place and then to be able to face the future with serenity. Psychology was also a way into other disciplines, and it helped them to understand the laws governing groups and hierarchies. In the senior section you had the opportunity to embark on a subject and expect to fully master it, exhausting it right down to the smallest detail, while taking daily care to update the sum of knowledge. Who, in the outside world, could possibly hope to achieve such thoroughness?

Other inmates studied with the sole aim of gaining good conduct points and achieving parole, which could knock ten or fifteen years off a sentence. Some of the more determined inmates had managed to reduce their sentences from a hundred and sixty to a hundred and fifty years.

Unlike the rest of the world, the Rikers seniors did not see death as the final reckoning. The final reckoning, for them, would be their first day of freedom. They had to cling on to the idea that one day, in two or three centuries' time, they would walk free and set off to discover a new world. Then there would be plenty of time to actually die.

“Then what?” Erwan asked, relighting his Romeo y Julieta.

“Well, then I might be tempted by one or two of the Asian languages. I spent so many years fighting the Japanese and Chinese Mafias that I think it might be time to start trying to understand how these guys work, and speaking their language might help.”

“When I finished my diploma in Chinese medicine, I studied Taoism and learned about their techniques for longevity, and that led naturally on to Tai Chi. Some of the legends tell of ancient masters who lived for between nine hundred and a thousand years.”

“I gave up all forms of physical activity at an early age.”

“You'll come round to it, Don Mimino. Not immediately, but you'll come round to it eventually.”

“We'll see. I'll study ancient medicine, and then specialize in rheumatology. My back is killing me . . .”

Someone knocked at the door. Unlike those of other cells, the senior ones were only closed with doors and partitions, and only had bars on the windows. “Chief” Morales, the head guard of the West Wing, which included the senior section, came in, carrying a box.

“It's my idiot nephew's regular parcel,” Erwan said, cutting it open with a knife. “You'll have a drop of liqueur with us, Chief?”

“Sorry, haven't got time. Block B is playing up.”

The guard, just as a formality, glanced inside the box, weighed up a couple of bottles, and left the cell. Chief Morales, despite his youth, was well respected by the inmates for his good sense and willingness to solve problems.

“We'll miss him when he retires,” said Don Mimino.

Erwan opened a bottle and sniffed the still-fresh aroma of coffee.

“A guy from Milan introduced me to this when he was staying here, back in the Seventies. It's less creamy than Irish coffee, less sickly. Between you and me, I've never really liked Irish whiskey either.”

Don Mimino took a sip from the little black glass his host handed to him.

“
Buono
.”

Erwan unpacked the five other bottles, put them in the cupboard and gathered the wrapping paper up into a pile. He was about to put them in the bin when his eye fell on the
Jules Vallès Gazette
.

“Hey, Don, is that French?”

The old Italian put on his glasses and inspected the cover.

“I think so, yes.”

“I'm not much good at languages, but I might have liked French. I'll think about it.”

“A lot of irregular verbs, they say.”

“Suppose we did it together, Don Mimino? That's an idea! In four years we'll be fluent, and I suggest we make French the official language during liqueur time. Could be fun!”

“You're all mad, you Irish . . .”

They clinked glasses and knocked back their drinks. Don Mimino, out of idle curiosity, took the
Jules Vallès Gazette
back to his cell, to study it in peace. He was tempted by the idea of learning French for just one reason: he would be able to watch the films on the Classics Channel without having to read the subtitles; he found French police films from the Fifties much closer to reality than American ones from the same era. Oddly he felt himself to be closer to Jean Gabin than George Raft.

He spent the afternoon learning by heart the subjunctive endings of the auxiliary verbs
essere
and
avere.
Then he dined alone in his cell, and dozed off in front of a variety show on Rai Due which he got on satellite TV. Late that night, he woke up, worried about having insomnia, couldn't sleep, and picked up the
Jules Vallès Gazette
. Really, he thought, it was a difficult language . . . Learning Chinese pictograms would be easier than this. But still, in fifty or sixty years, who knew? Before closing the magazine and trying to get back to sleep, Don Mimino's tired eyes caught sight of one line of text at the bottom of a column. Just more words, but this time in a familiar language.

Boris Godunov?
If it's good enough for you, it's good enough for me!

He sat up in bed, his old vertebrae cracking. The piece was signed by a certain Warren Blake.

If it's good enough for you . . .

That pun belonged to him, Maurizio Gallone, known in forty states as Don Mimino.

. . . it's good enough for me!

The few times he had crossed paths with the son of that motherfucker Manzoni, the boy had reminded him of the joke, it had become a sort of ritual between them. Besides, they had nothing else to say to one another.

And as for the three hundred and forty-five years he had left on this island, well, he owed them to the boy's father, Giovanni Manzoni.

The Don didn't need to learn French to understand where the magazine came from:
written and edited by the pupils of the Lycée Jules Vallès, Cholong-sur-Avre, Normandy.

He had to make a telephone call, and it was urgent.

He yelled down the corridor, waking up Chief Morales.

None of the four Blakes had ever tried to be loved – they had never sought any favours. And yet they had all in different ways found themselves becoming increasingly popular in larger and larger, sometimes overlapping, circles. If you crossed paths with one of them, you would soon hear about another, and then a third, through coincidental connections. They were talked about at school, in the market, so much so that the rumour had now spread throughout the town that this was a quite exceptional family.

Maggie's voluntary work for various charitable organizations had become well known. People praised her courage as well as her discretion, and they admired her energy and commitment. She was active in the preparations for the town fair and the school concert; she helped with the information campaign about the sorting of domestic rubbish; she attended residents' meetings; she spent two afternoons a week cataloguing at the local library; and when there was a one- or two-hour gap in her timetable, she laid the foundations for her own charitable enterprise, which she would soon be putting before the town council. The more demands that were made on her, the more she rose to the occasion, and if, from time to time, she weakened, and began to find that the whole idea of charity was losing its charm, she would be needled back into action by the cruel memory of the past; remorse would drive her on, like a sharp pike in the back of a condemned man. Anyway, what mattered was not the reasons for her altruistic behaviour, but its results – after all, she had no interest in what drove the other volunteers to help total strangers. At the very start of the exercise, she had been curious about their motives, and had identified several types. There were the sufferers, who devoted themselves to others in order to escape from themselves. Then there were the unhappy ones, who gave because they had never received, and the opposite – the privileged and the idle, who wanted to find a way to pass the time. There were believers, who, under a halo of self-sacrifice, worked for the poor with half an eye on their own holy reflection; these people had a special expression as they worked, a kind but controlled smile, arms wide open like vales of tears, eyes moistened by all the misery they had witnessed. You could also find the progressive thinker, looking to others to salve his conscience; the plain fact of helping the disinherited brought him an extraordinary sense of intellectual well-being. Others expected to expiate their sins by one single action. Still others went against their own natures and stopped justifying their cynicism about the decadence of the world. And there were also those who, without realizing it, were finally growing up.

Nowadays, Maggie no longer cared which of them had a real empathy for the unhappiness of others, and which felt true indignation at the sight of injustice, or whose heart beat with solidarity with his fellow man, or bled for the sins of the world. Actions trumped intentions, and every little helped. In Cholong, voluntary work was now all the rage, and there were so many new vocations that they would soon run out of needy people to help.

Warren treated his new fame as the recognition he deserved. The services he had performed for the younger generation had brought him respect – something he valued above all things. The father had been a traitor; it was now time for the son to assume the role and become the giver of the “alternative” justice that prevails once the law has failed. He had dropped the criminal side of Mafia behaviour, and had just retained their way of getting things done; he was now the only advocate of the forgotten ones, their only hope of gaining reparation. His justice and protection were expensive commodities, but nothing is free in this base world. Going to cry on his shoulder would put you in his debt for a long time, but what could be more precious than seeing the person who had wronged you begging for forgiveness? No price was too great for such a sight. Warren made it his business to carry out any request that seemed reasonable to him, and the other boys saw him as a hero:
Warren can help you, Warren will know what to do, ask Warren, Warren is fair, Warren is good, Warren is Warren.
His real strength lay in the fact that he never sought people out, he let them come to him; he never tried to lead, but simply accepted the authority granted to him; he never asked, just waited until it was offered. His idol, Al Capone, no less, would have been proud of him. Warren paid the price for such great power by living a secret life, as his equals had done before him. A true leader observed the law of silence, and let those who were bursting to pour out their souls come to him.
Give them what they need.
And what they needed was to be listened to. He endeavoured to get the clearest possible picture of the plaintiff's case before taking a side, or taking the case. This was the foundation of his power and the basis of his future position as leader. The structure was growing a little each day.

Although Warren had never sought followers, he had become the role model for a whole generation in Cholong, all inspired by this gift for listening, which seemed to hold the key to so many problems.

Warren had never dared question his father about his decision to become a state witness against his own people. The day would come when such a conversation could no longer be avoided, but he didn't yet feel brave enough to ask – his father was still a figure of authority despite his miserable house-bound existence.

The trauma of the trial and its repercussions had not dented Fred's extraordinarily tough inner core, which enabled him to move between the role of protector and threat as circumstances changed. The people of Cholong, in their way, were more aware of the protector in him. He would be described as a man who had knocked about the world and met the movers and shakers, who had inspired shelf-loads of books. They had a feeling that the “American” or the “writer” had the makings of a leader of men. Women turned round as he walked by, men waved at him from afar, children hero-worshipped him. He was admired for many different reasons, but all could see that what he had was natural authority. Frederick Blake was one of those rare beings people prefer to be friends with, but without quite knowing why. When he appeared in a group, they were simultaneously worried and reassured, and the chemistry changed completely: one nasty look, one handshake, and the strong were weak and the weak strong. He was the undisputed leader of the pack, the dominant male. It was a role he would happily have done without, but there was nothing to be done, it had always been thus: a decision to be made, an answer given, everybody turned to Fred, without quite knowing why. His size and his chunky corpulence did not enter into it – men twice his height would bend down to him and lower their voices. Often men he'd never seen before. Who knows where such authority comes from? He himself had no idea, it was some blend of magnetism and inner aggression, combined with a certain stillness about the body, everything coming from the expression in the eyes: there was always an undeclared potential for violence in there somewhere. When he was in the town, Fred walked as though still surrounded by bodyguards, conscious of his firepower, with a private army ready to die for him. They envied him his way of expressing disagreement, without raising his voice or being unnaturally friendly. A boy brushed against an old lady with his bike? Fred would take him by the collar and make him apologize. Beer a little flat? The bartender was only too delighted to change the barrels. A gatecrasher trying to get past him? A simple movement of the finger and he was back outside. He had never been afraid of dealing with strangers when the situation required it. He had never suspected others of aggressive intentions, or felt threatened before the threat came. He couldn't understand how, out in the streets, fear had turned into cowardice, and paranoia into silent hatred. Nowadays he could feel that fear everywhere and it wasn't any use to anyone. What a waste.

The beautiful, the pure Belle, on the other hand, lived in an alternative world. Her existence was living proof that the most beautiful flowers grow on cactuses, swamps or dung heaps. Evil had given birth to grace and innocence, and this grace and innocence gave pleasure to many. You saw Belle in the street and already you felt better. Hers was not a haughty, cruel beauty – it was generous, open to all, without distinction or snobbery. Everyone was accorded a kind gesture, a friendly word and angelic look, and those who weren't satisfied with that were sorry – Belle remained untouchable, and the unfortunate fools who had pushed their luck now regretted it bitterly. Her confidence added to her beauty, as it allowed her to smile at strangers and reply to compliments without lowering her head. The gloomiest of pessimists only needed a moment in her company to restore his faith in life. In her own way, she proved that humanity was capable of better things; her role as an exceptional person was to respond to cynicism and despair with goodness and hope. Good fairies really did exist, and made everybody want to be better.

That morning, she walked along the Place de la Libération, followed by the catcalls and wolf whistles of the fairground people setting up the attractions, among which was a big wheel like the one at the Foire du Trone in Paris. Belle stopped for a moment to look at the men, balancing up high, fixing the gondolas onto the wheel, and decided that she'd go up there and see what the town looked like from above as soon as the fair opened.

A countdown had begun in Cholong: only four days until the annual fair, the best in the region, twenty-four hours of non-stop festivity, the beginning of the long-awaited summer. As well as a merry-go-round with wooden horses and bumping cars, which you could find anywhere else, the big wheel attracted people from three neighbouring
départements
, and was never empty. The town looked like a Luna Park by day, and Las Vegas by night.

Fred had announced that fairground music depressed him, and that he would spend the whole weekend on his veranda. In any case he had better things to do: chapter five of his great work dealt with the big fundamental issues of life, and answered the questions that common people asked about greater and smaller issues in the criminal world.

Every man has his price. It's not whores that are in short supply, it's money. If you can't control people with money, you've got them if you know their particular perversion, and if you don't know that, there's always their ambition. You have no idea what a businessman is capable of doing to get some business, or an actor to get a part, or a politician to get elected. I once even got a bishop to sign a forged cheque in exchange for building an orphanage which would be named after him. You sometimes get people wrong, you think they're angels – in fact they're bastards. An ambitious man can conceal an angel, and the bastard might just be ambitious – you just have to find out who went wrong at the first bribery attempt, and do it right the next time. I've seen so many men abandon their fine principles once they're shown something they've always longed for. No one can resist that. Temptation . . . it's often much more effective than threats. I once came across a guy, well, a couple really, who would have done anything to have a child, and . . .

The telephone rang, stopping him in mid-sentence. With a curse on his lips, he got up. Di Cicco, on the line, could hardly bring out the words.

“You didn't do it, Manzoni? You didn't dare!”

“What have I done now?”

Holding the receiver, the agent was kicking the camp bed beside him, trying to wake his colleague. Through the window he could see a figure in beige Bermuda shorts and T-shirt looking for an address in the Rue des Favorites.

“Is that your nephew outside?”

“Ben there already? I'm coming!”

He cheerfully hung up on Di Cicco and ran outside.

“Tell the boss,” Di Cicco yelled at Caputo, whose dream turned into a nightmare as he watched Fred, in the middle of the street, hugging his nephew.

Benedetto Manzoni, known as Ben to the family, and “D” to his workmates, had arrived in Europe for the first time, and had been looking forward to seeing his uncle after so many years. One call had been enough to bring him over.

“Good journey?”

“A bit long, I'm not used to that.”

“Have you put on weight, Ben?”

“Yeah, the girls say it suits me.”

Ben was nearly thirty, but still looked like a plump adolescent – he was of medium height, with black hair, black eyes that shone like marbles, ill-shaven, with his hands deep in his pockets: he had always gone for the relaxed look – comfort for him took absolute priority over any aesthetic considerations. He kept all the essentials of his life in the multiple pockets of his famous beige shorts: papers, a few souvenirs, a survival kit. His camouflage jacket held the wherewithal for his happiness and spiritual well-being: one or two books, a few joints, a mobile phone and a video-game console. Fred, who couldn't think of anything to say, hugged his nephew again, his favourite nephew, a true Manzoni, with his Manzoni looks and general attitude. Fred had always wondered about the link between uncles and nephews, that curious form of light-hearted affection, strong but without any connotations of duty and obligation. He could put on an air of authority with Ben, and would have tolerated it being mocked, but of course that had never happened.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fred saw the two shapes leaning out of the window at number 9.

“We'd better go and see the agents, get it out of the way.”

Di Cicco and Caputo saw them approaching. They collapsed into their armchairs, stunned, unable to understand how Fred had managed to deceive them.

“If I'd asked your permission to invite my nephew, would you have said yes?”

“Never.”

“We haven't seen each other for six years. He's practically my son! And you know perfectly well he's got no contacts with the Mob.”

After the trial which had decimated the ranks of the five families, anyone called Manzoni had had to disappear as far away as possible, and stay out of the smallest corner of Mob activity. Having a turncoat uncle had cost Benedetto dear. He had lost his only friends, his honour, his name. There'll be a silver lining, people had said at the time, now he could develop a talent for some legitimate activity. Alas, Benedetto's problem was that he had no talent that could possibly be used legitimately.