The Four Corners of Palermo (3 page)

At first, it could have been a Western. Open with a shot of cowboys, two gunmen face-to-face, fifty feet apart: crosscutting. Classic images, cut off at the knee to focus on the holsters and the six-shooters. Their Sonoran desert was Piazza Scaffa at three in the morning. In 1860, two hundred yards to the west, Garibaldi’s soldiers, his
picciotti
, had beaten Franceschiello’s troops on the Ponte dell’Ammiraglio. That night in 1982, two very different
picciotti
were facing off, one on one, over an issue of honor and respect. Something much weightier than a mere question of national unity.

Totuccio Spataro, twenty-five years old, also known as Peduzzo, the number-one killer of the Ciaculli Mafia clan, showed up first. His moniker refered to his tiny feet, size 39, the kind of feet you’d expect of a soccer playmaker such as Francesco Totti, not of a professional killer. When Mother Nature created Peduzzo, she skimped on his footprints and
his empathy for his fellow man. Totuccio had built a reputation by mercilessly slaughtering anyone he was sent out against. He never wanted details: just first and last names, and some indication of how spectacular a murder his bosses were looking for; the way a killing was carried out was the teachable moment, so to speak.

Killing someone from a moving motorcycle means showing respect for your target: it means they’re someone hard to reach and to hit, like the greater amberjack, which is a carnivorous fish.
“Incaprettare”
a victim, hog-tying someone so he chokes himself to death, is a very different message: a sign of absolute contempt for a body reduced to a self-strangling mass; even worse, you can arrange for the victim to be found gift-wrapped in this contemptuous manner in a car trunk, left out in the hot sun of a Palermo summer.

Totuccio Spataro knew how to impart both death and lessons with equal efficacy. And he was unbeatable. At least until that night on Piazza Scaffa, when he found himself face-to-face with his only cousin who, unbelievably, had chosen not to become a professional killer. That was an act of betrayal: turning his back on the family business.

Totuccio looked around, wary of the possibility that someone might be hiding. He mechanically brushed back his bangs; he had a head of brown hair atop a face that seemed designed to be easily forgotten. He wasn’t tall, and on his feet he wore a pair of counterfeit Fila running shoes, in a boy’s size. He dressed in a nondescript fashion, with a special fondness for jean jackets, under which he customarily carried a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 Special. More or less the way other men carried a pack of Marlboros. But Totuccio didn’t smoke, so he always had room for the .38. He carried
a holy card of Padre Pio, next to his spare ammunition. For a professional killer, the miraculous hand is sort of like the value-added tax for a handyman or a plumber: it’s something that can always be added if the customer wishes.

Once he’d established to his satisfaction that the piazza was empty, he crouched down next to a white Fiat 127 that, under the cheap yellowish lights of Piazza Scaffa, had turned a bilious hue. They had an appointment to meet at 3:00 a.m. To talk. Or to die. Marinello showed up a short while later with Rosalba; they’d taken her parents’ baby-blue Ford Fiesta. They parked along the Corso dei Mille, a hundred yards from Piazza Scaffa. They’d backed into the parking space, ready to tear out of there.

“You stay here, my love,” Marinello said, laying a hand on her thigh.

She obeyed, and slid over behind the wheel: she’d just been issued her learner’s permit, and she wasn’t an experienced driver—but putting the car in first gear and hitting the accelerator, sure, that was something she’d learned right away. She’d need to avoid the chaotic line of mini Dumpsters, a postmodern barricade that exuded a horrible stench of garbage, an involuntary and sacrilegious homage to Guttuso’s painting
The Battle of Ponte dell’Ammiraglio
. The impetuous charge of a red shirt, the saber brandished by General Garibaldi, the
picciotti
who were dying for an Italy that had never been more remote as far as the populace of Palermo was concerned, a populace that had been crushed during the revolt of 1820, never to rise again. And yet, the red shirts had fought, and they had won.

Marinello knew nothing about all this as he was walking toward the Dumpsters. He knew only that Rosalba would
have to be a good driver to avoid them: would have to slalom through, if things turned ugly. If he were killed.

He checked the leather belt that was holding up his jeans. Behind the buckle he’d slipped in a Beretta M9 Parabellum, straight out of an American movie. At the small of his back, the grip of the .32, which was an easier gun to handle, brushed against his spine. He looked down at his shoes: a pair of red suede Adidas, the three white stripes filthy with soil and dust. And then he made up his mind to go meet his own family, a family that was waiting for him somewhere around here, perhaps in ambush behind one of those parked cars.

Totuccio saw Marinello walking toward him. He got to his feet: this was a matter for men standing erect.

“Cousin, you have to be a man. Either you come away with us immediately, you give up that
buttana
, and you do as the family says, or else …”

“Or else what, you piece of shit?”

Now they were about fifty feet apart, face-to-face. They’d grown up together: going to the same parties, the same baptisms, but with different destinies awaiting them.

Marinello wanted his freedom, and he was ready to kill for it.

“Or else what?”

“Or else I’ll shoot you here and now. You’re blood of my blood, and I’m not going to slit your throat in some ambush. I’m giving you a chance to defend yourself; we’re going to fight like men. We’ll see who can draw first and fire, but you still have a chance to choose: come with us and we’ll take you home.”

Neither of the two men had a gun in his hands yet. The yellowish glow of the streetlights illuminated the line of
Dumpsters, two charred automobile carcasses, stacks of fruit crates at the corner of Via Brancaccio and Corso dei Mille, where Piazza Scaffa began. From her seat in the Fiesta, Rosalba could make out the two silhouettes in the distance. The closer of the two was Marinello, farther off was the man who held their lives in the balance.

She saw a first flash of gunfire. Then a second one. In the course of a few moments, there were four flashes, then five. The two dark figures were hardly moving, as if neither one was trying to dodge the bullets. Marinello fell to his knees, and her heart stood still. She could no longer hear a thing; only her eyes were working now, focused on the other man approaching, dragging one leg and reaching around for something behind his back: the second gun. Everything started moving again, at twice normal speed.

He’s about to shoot him in the head, he’s about to shoot him in the head
.

Rosalba moved quickly: she put the Fiesta in gear, gunned it around the barricade of Dumpsters, and then accelerated hard, hurtling straight at the man moving closer to Marinello, forcing him to dive to the cement to keep from being hit by the oncoming car. She slammed on the brakes, got her man into the car, and took off. Heading for a place where, unfortunately, they still spoke Sicilian dialect.

“Ciao? Francesca? Do you remember the other night at the Bar La Torre?”

“I remember you: you’re that reporter who uses too many words.”

“It’s nice to know that my time here on earth has made an impression on someone.”

“You didn’t waste much time …”

“I wanted to know how things were in Milan.”

“That’s not true.”

“Okay. I wanted to know how lawyers rate in social standing up there in your city.”

“Very high.”

“Higher than journalists?”

“Are you interested in how I’m doing?”

“Fine, let’s start over:
Ciao
, Francesca. I’m the reporter you met the other night in Palermo.”

“
Ciao!
How are you doing?”

“Fine,
grazie
. Sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering if you happen to have a lawyer handy? There’s a question I’d like to ask him.”

She hung up on me.

I felt like a fool. I called her back. She took pity on me.

“Forgive me, it’s just that I spent the whole day trying to track down a guy who’s half a killer.”

“While I was busy with half a casting call for a sleepwear catalog, and I couldn’t say which line of work is more dangerous to your health.”

She was funny, not just smart: I was already starting to feel inadequate. In any case, she didn’t deserve to spend her time with a lawyer. I told her about how I spent my workday as a beat reporter, uselessly trying to track down a case that was, more than anything else, only a ghost of a case.

As we were talking, two of my colleagues were busy tidying up—organizing their notes, putting away their pens.
There are obsessive journalists who can’t seem to work unless their desks are clean enough to be an advertisement for furniture polish. One of the two actually kept a bottle of rubbing alcohol in his desk drawer: at the end of the workday he’d spray it over the linoleum of his desktop, and with sheets of the morning edition, he’d wipe it clean. He worked the crime beat, just like me: I always thought that he had a male nurse’s approach to the news.

Every now and then Francesca would laugh at my wisecracks about Palermo, the Mafia, life with Cicova and Fabrizio. I thought a friendship was blooming. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

We said goodbye, promising to talk again in the coming days, provided the lawyer was at her side. This time she didn’t hang up; she just laughed and told me: “
Ciao
, stupid.”

I had just put down the receiver when the phone rang. The quick double ring of a call from the switchboard.

“There’s a guy named Salvo who wants to talk to you.”

“
Grazie
, put him through …
 Ciao
, Salvo, I’m glad to hear your voice.”

“I’ve been calling you for half an hour. The line was busy the whole time.”

“It was an important interview; I’m trying to pin something down up north.”

“Okay, well, I just wanted to tell you that even though it’s seven-thirty in the evening, if you like, I’d be glad to buy you an espresso. At the usual place.”

“I’m on my way.”

I said a hasty goodnight to my colleagues, hopped on my Vespa, and headed toward police headquarters. The usual bar. Salvo was already there, sitting at a table inside. He was about
to start the night shift in a squad car. He actually needed that cup of coffee.

“Are you still interested in that story about what happened on Piazza Scaffa?”

“Damn straight I’m interested.”

“We’ve learned a few things: First of all, the two guys who shot at each other are Marinello and Totuccio Spataro, second cousins. And it seems to have been over a question of family honor.”

“In the sense that one of the two of them seems to have fucked the other one’s girlfriend?”

“No. In the sense that Marinello went to pick oranges in the wrong fruit orchard.”

“He took someone to bed he shouldn’t have?”

“Worse: he’s dating a civilian. The daughter of a civil servant who works on the aqueduct, a guy by the surname of Corona. Good citizens, and she’s a good
picciotta
. But it still goes against the rules. You can only date
picciotte
from your own circles: these are matters of security, and only blood ties are acceptable. They told him so, but he wouldn’t listen. It came in one ear, it went out the other.”

“So they shot him.”

“They shot each other. He and Totuccio, the super-killer. And you know who died? Neither one. Funny story, isn’t it?”

I thanked him and did my best to pay for the two espressos, but Salvo shot the barista a murderous glance: “It’s a question of territorial rights, big guy.”

I went home. I got changed. And I rushed over to Roberto’s place: he was a fellow journalist who covered schools and unions; he lived alone in his parents’ house. His parents had just moved back to their hometown, a village in the Agrigento
province, where they were farming full-time, growing olives and grapes. Roberto, inebriated by the independence and square footage of the place he now lived in, had invited all his friends over to watch Italy versus Cameroon, a crucial match in the elimination rounds of the 1982 World Cup, being held in Spain.

The goalkeeper was a certain N’Kono, who, over the years had become an international legend. On the table, which was covered with a plastic tablecloth, sat several cardboard trays of
sfincione
—Sicily’s distinctive pizza, with its scent of tomato and onions
—arancini
rice balls, and a couple of bottles of “black” Pachino wine, a red so dark that the light doesn’t show through. The black-and-white television set had been moved to the middle of the room, creating a fairly persuasive bleachers effect: chairs of three different varieties—plastic chairs, baroque-style wooden chairs that belonged to his mother, and wicker chairs that had belonged to his grandmother—were arranged in rows. We cheerfully took our seats. I thought nothing of Marinello, of Totuccio, or even of the guy by the name of Corona. I focused completely on the goalkeeper N’Kono, who I thought was the only new character to emerge that day.