Malavita (23 page)

“Now – which one of you is prepared to die for Giovanni Manzoni?”

*

Five minutes later, Jerry parked the minibus at the corner of the Rue des Favorites, with the Blakes' house in their sights, fifty yards away.

Hit hard and without warning. No chance should be missed to destroy Manzoni at the first opportunity, making maximum use of the element of surprise. Strategy must be sacrificed to impact. Sanfelice got out the wooden box containing the AT-4 Viper, and set to work preparing the rocket.

“Penetration power fifteen inches of armoured steel, speed three hundred and thirty yards per second, light, easy handling, dependable, our GIs love it,” he said, putting it on his shoulder. “Get back behind me, you guys, if you don't want to look like a pizza for the rest of your lives.”

Matt Gallone, Franck Rosello, Guy Barber and Jerry Wine all stood beside him, watching. Hector Sosa, in the minibus, kept an eye on the agents, who had made no attempt to resist. Matt was right: Feds they might be, but they had no desire to die for the sake of a Manzoni. Sooner or later, Don Mimino's men would have found the Rue des Favorites, and nothing could have prevented what was about to happen. To croak just in order to delay the operation would have been a professional mistake. They had been taught that during their training: don't die uselessly.

Hector couldn't help looking away from them to watch the spectacle. The rocket flew straight, softly piercing the façade of the house before exploding inside, throwing the walls outwards, opening the whole building up like a flower, so that the roof and the first floor collapsed in one block, down to the ground. Sprays of brick flew up and crashed down in a hundred-yard perimeter around the point of impact. A thick cloud of dust, like poisonous fog, hung over it for several seconds, before dissolving and gradually letting the light of day return to the Rue des Favorites.

“Don't go there yet. The temperature inside will be up to two thousand degrees.”

Greg knew the AT-4 Viper of old. He had used it during an attack on a bullion convoy: it had completely melted the driver's cabin, like something in a cartoon. For this one brilliant single shot he had spent days training in a bus graveyard in the middle of the Nevada desert. Considering his contribution over, he packed the launcher back into its container. All he had to do now was wait for confirmation of a single fact – that Giovanni Manzoni had been destroyed.

A second before the conflagration, Fred had been lying on the ground, his eyes sore from so much crying. He had made the terrible decision to leave Cholong immediately and break out of the Witness Protection Programme, to give up expecting any help from the American government. After Maggie's denunciation, all that was left for him was to flee, leaving his family to live out in the open, without the awful sensation of being watched night and day by a third party. By going it alone, he would be removing his family from danger, giving them back their lives. He just needed to go by the house to fetch a few things before evaporating into the background. Then came the explosion, so sudden and so intense that he stopped dead, frozen to the spot. Feeling weightless, he slid along the side of Quint's headquarters to have a look down the street; he saw that the very spot in which he had spent most of the last few months was now no more than a dusty cavity, a hole filled with rubble. Suddenly he heard a strangled cry, which he recognized. He ran into the Feds' house, where he saw a hysterical Maggie trying to escape from Quint's grasp. He was holding her flat on the ground, his hand over her mouth. Fred threw himself down to help him put his wife out of action, and prevent her from screaming for help. Quint pulled his hand back and stunned Maggie with a blow on the back of the neck. Then he placed her head carefully down on a corner of the carpet. He left the room for a moment and returned with a first-aid kit, from which he drew a metal box containing a syringe. Maggie had to be protected from herself, and straight away.

“She'll sleep for at least six hours.”

They crawled a few yards over to the window, and raised themselves up just enough to glimpse, at an angle, a minibus surrounded by a handful of armed men who were about to approach the rubble.

“Apart from Matt Gallone and Franck Rosello, I don't know the others,” Fred muttered.

“The little dark one is Jerry Wine, and the one putting away the RPG is Greg Sanfelice.”

Quint wondered how these lowlifes had found their way to the Manzonis. Six years of work had been wiped out before his very eyes. He couldn't believe that anyone in Washington or Quantico would have talked, and put the problem off until later. How many were there? Five? Ten? Twenty? More? However many they were, he knew that this was the elite, and that Don Mimino's men would blindly obey any order they were given. If it had been established in New York that that rat Manzoni was living in a little town in Normandy, France, they would raze the little town in Normandy, France, to the ground and carry on from there. Much as Thomas Quintiliani hated the Mafia, he couldn't help respecting men who pursued their aims with such determination. Don Mimino lived according to his own rules, you had to give him that.

Once the dust cloud had evaporated, Matt rushed over to the ruins, with his Smith & Wesson in his hand. Greg was adamant about it: if there had been anything alive at the moment of the conflagration, whatever it was was now truly dead and already buried, so what was the problem? But Matt was determined to obey his grandfather's orders to the letter, not to leave the premises until he had spat on the body of his enemy. If it hadn't been for possible problems with customs, Don Mimino wouldn't have said no to a little souvenir for himself, Manzoni's heart in a jar of formaldehyde, for example. It would have been something to show to anyone who might have been considering following in his footsteps, and it might also have been a nice decorative piece for one of the shelves in his prison cell. Matt told the men to come and help clear up so as to be certain. Jerry brought the picks and spades out of the boot.

Quintiliani, still crouching on the ground, was trying to call his men, but neither Caputo nor Di Cicco were picking up, and he drew his own conclusions. Fred remained spellbound by the spectacle of these men, some of whom he had known, and loved like brothers, now digging in the ruins of his house, searching for his body.

“I'm going to try and get reinforcements, but for the moment we can only count on ourselves,” said Quintiliani, with astonishing sangfroid.

Jerry, with his pickaxe in hand, was bending over the pile of stones that, ten minutes before, had been a kitchen, when he heard a ghostly wailing sound. He alerted Matt.

“Sounds like a kid crying.”

From the depths of the pit came a voice not strong enough to scream, but which refused to stop. Greg, who had been the cause of many types of scream during his career, had never heard such a heartbreaking sound. Guy wanted to bring it to an end before even finding out what it came from. They pulled back several pieces from walls reduced to rubble, pulled out a metal sink, picked up some kitchen equipment and hacked into the floorboards. They were just pulling back some breeze blocks, when suddenly the whole floor gave way, and they found themselves buried up to the waist. Jerry helped pull them out of this trap, but the unbearable wailing continued unabated, indeed it seemed that the creature had regained hope that someone would rescue it.

Malavita, in her lair, had survived the explosion. A form of life that had once resembled a dog emerged from the bowels of the earth. She finally emerged into the fresh air, exhausted, her flanks pouring with blood. Her bleeding, broken body was covered in cuts. As soon as she saw the men standing still, watching her, she recognized them as her torturers and gazed at them with a pleading stare.

Matt sneered at Sanfelice's great confidence: “Nothing left alive” – here was something alive that had emerged from the cataclysm. And so might not Manzoni himself be in there too, that scum who had been defying them for all these years? In a fury, he attacked the dog, all that trouble for this motherfucking pooch! He grabbed an iron bar and began hitting the dog so ferociously that his men had to intervene. In the face of such barbarity, Malavita began to be sorry she had survived the earthquake.

Quint turned away, disgusted, went over to the metal trunk, and unbolted it.

“Help yourself, Manzoni,” he said, loading the barrel of a revolver.

But Fred didn't have the strength any more. Still kneeling in front of the window, he toppled to the ground and burst into tears.

Maggie had reacted immediately, with her cry of fear, seeing her children, her flesh, her whole world collapsing. Fred had only just reached that point.

Tom felt responsible for the tragedy, since it had been he who had consigned them to the house until further orders. He could normally find words for any occasion, but now, faced with the distress of a man who thinks his children are buried beneath the rubble of their home, he was struck dumb.

It was true. Fred could not accept the unacceptable: he had just lost for ever the manuscript of his memoirs.

*

Warren waited alone on the platform for the Paris express, his pockets laden with kit. The worst was over. He was on his way, and this train wouldn't stop until he had regained his rightful position.

The first stage, rebuilding a new American Mafia, would begin with the creation of a Luciano-style committee, organized like the United Nations, which would be in charge of defending territories; those who failed to respect non-interference pacts would be taken in hand by independent soldiers, the Mafia equivalent of the blue helmets, who only took orders from the committee. Then he would impose on each family a system of filial law in which women would play a much more important part. The stronger the family ties, the less betrayal there would be: it is always much harder to betray a mother or a sister. Making the organization more woman-friendly would have many other virtues and would reinforce the sense of community. The old retrograde, ossified Mediterranean model had reached the limits of its usefulness. They would, once and for all, leave the Middle Ages behind them and introduce a real sense of equality by giving women the power they so richly deserved. The next stage, probably the most delicate one, would be to steer the Mafia in a more “ecumenical” direction – that word kept coming into his head. Through the use of diplomacy, he might perhaps succeed where all other attempts at unity had failed: other races and religions would be accepted without distinction and integrated according to strictly observed quotas. The Mob had been decimated by wars against the Chinese and the Puerto Ricans – those days must now be over for ever. Apart from all these changes, the basic structure of the organization would remain the same: one boss for every three lieutenants, each of which would have ten men beneath him. The number of bosses would vary according to the region; a group of bosses would form a family, each family with its godfather, and the group of godfathers would form the top level of authority, itself presided over by the
capo di tutti i capi.
And that role was one Warren was perfectly happy to see himself in, in the fullness of time.

He suddenly saw two shapes on the freight tracks a hundred yards away; they appeared from between two grain wagons, part of an interminably long train that seemed to have been abandoned there. The men, in their forties, dressed in sporty clothes, were clearly lost, and in a hurry to find their way back to where they came from. They hurried towards him. Warren noticed something familiar about their demeanour, from several small clues: heads slightly pulled into the shoulders, a sort of awkward stoop, along with great speed of movement and a powerful physical presence. When they got close enough, Warren, his heart pounding now, recognized their features as those of his fellow countrymen. One, he could swear blind, was Italian, and the other could only be a pure-bred Irishman, a fucking mick, a paddy, a harp, quite unmistakeable. Warren felt the joy of someone meeting his countrymen on foreign soil, that feeling of instinctive solidarity, that brotherly link that passes beyond frontiers. These were his homeboys. He could see himself again when he was very young, playing at the feet of these tall men in dark suits who used to pat him gently on the head. They had been his role models – there would never be any better ones. And one day he would be one of them.

His initial enthusiasm was suddenly assailed by doubt, however. Why had these ghosts from the past suddenly appeared, just as he was making his plans for the future? Why had New Jersey come to him, and not the other way around? Warren lowered his eyes, suddenly realizing that these guys could only have got lost in Cholong-sur-Avre for one good reason, a reason that might not be good news for the Manzonis.

Nick Bongusto and Joey Wine had come out of the school. Break was over. Matt had rung them to tell them about the fiasco at the Manzonis' house and to order them to get back to the minibus, which was parked on the edge of the Place de la Libération. The whole business was turning out to be more complicated than they had thought. Time to set to work, and really earn those two million dollars. They climbed onto the Paris platform and finally found a person to ask – a young man standing alone, staring at the ground. Young Blake had had time now to remember the ghastly story of the snitch's son, who had been taken hostage by the Mob to prevent his father from testifying. The father had testified, and, a few days later, what remained of the son had been found by the FBI at the bottom of a barrel of acid. Warren, seeing the two men approaching him, felt a stab in his guts, from the memory of all the threats he had heard about since childhood. It was at the root of everything, it was the basic tool, the touchstone of the whole Mafia operation – pure terror. His head felt as though it was held in a vice, his breathing stopped, his neck stiffened in pain. He felt an icy stab in his churning gut; it drained him of all strength and paralysed him; he couldn't prevent a thin dribble of urine trickling down his leg. He, who a moment ago had seen himself as the supreme chief of organized crime, was now prepared to go down on his knees and pray for his father to appear on the platform and save him.