The Four Corners of Palermo (4 page)

The following morning I called an old classmate from elementary school, an employee of the city administration’s personnel office, and asked him if he could discreetly dig up a little background on this guy named Corona who worked on the aqueduct. Just a few hours later he called me back from his home.

“Arcangelo Corona, age fifty-one, born in Palermo, employed by AMAP, the water company. He is the point man for relations with private Sicilian suppliers. You know, with
the perennial water shortage, sometimes we find ourselves forced to buy from these people. They charge sky-high prices, but what other choice do we have? Corona bargains hard for the best price, and he turns in an honest day’s work. He’s married to a woman called Mariapia Cuzzupane, age forty, born in Aliminusa. The daughter of a cattle rancher, respectable family. They live on Viale Piemonte, a good part of town, but I don’t have to tell you that. They have one daughter, Rosalba, age eighteen, enrolled at the Liceo Garibaldi. They also tell me that she’s a hot babe.”

I thanked him and promised that we’d get together for a pizza soon with all our old classmates from the Alberico Gentili elementary school: he was a guy who cared about that kind of thing. Like many Palermitans, he lived stubbornly in the past; the present was nothing more than a deformation, and often a useless one, of what had once been. As proof of the accuracy of this theory, Roberto and my other friends often pointed to the grammar of Sicilian dialect: the only grammatical form of the past tense is the remote past, and there is no future tense. At the very most, if he’s really trying to lay it on, a Palermitan might use the present tense.

The theory is true.

The nights of the Spanish World Cup were also nights of police sweeps against the Mafia. The Italian state was doing its best to gather its strength and strike back. Courageous policemen and carabinieri
,
under the leadership of magistrates and judges who were every bit as courageous, and whose names are cherished in the memory of our country, carried out numerous arrests. A preliminary attack was launched on Cosa Nostra, and Cosa Nostra
lashed back with a season of bloodbaths. The first demonstration of sheer Mafia power was unleashed at the behest of Totò Riina’s Corleonese clan on June 16, 1982: a massacre of carabinieri on the Palermo beltway, with the added objective of rubbing out a rival, the Catania mob boss Alfio Ferlito, who was being transferred from one prison to another. The attack came in the late morning, just as the West German team was finishing its warm-up exercises in preparation for the match against Algeria, scheduled to start at 5:15 that afternoon. I showed up on the site of the slaughter with a television crew, which I ordered to stay back behind the police barriers out of respect for the bodies of the three dead carabinieri
.

Then, with a confident step and an irritable expression, I walked past all the barriers that had been set up around the crime scene, until I reached the people reporting to the prefect of police, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, about the circumstances of the bloodbath. I joined them
.

Two cars with the professional killers on board had maneuvered in close to the Carabinieri squad car that was carrying the mob boss Ferlito. Then all hell broke loose, a hail of lead from several AK-47s. None of the carabinieri had a chance to get off a shot. Dalla Chiesa listened as I nodded along with two other young plainclothes officers: everyone assumed that I was just one more investigator. Then one of the two plainclothesmen furrowed his brow as he looked at me. “Excuse me, but who are you?” I wasn’t about to lie: “A reporter.” Dalla Chiesa rolled his eyes to the sky above. His men pushed me out of there fast
.

Rosalba was stretched out next to Marinello, whose fever had subsided. Their bodies, side by side, were an impregnable island.

“Heart of my hearts, I can feel that you’re better already,” she said, running her hand slowly over his chest.

He smiled, without the twist of a grimace on his lips.

“The shot got rid of my fever and the stitches don’t hurt me anymore. The Professore is a good doctor.”

“He left something for us to eat, too: a couple of rice balls and a bottle of Coca-Cola. He said that you’ll have to stay in bed for a while longer.”

Marinello automatically checked to make sure he had his pistol by his side: he did.

“I need to go home and see my mother and father for half an hour, they haven’t heard from me since yesterday.”

“You can’t use the Ford Fiesta. Totuccio saw it.”

“I know; it’s put away, downstairs, in the garage. I’ll take the bus. I’ll be back soon, I swear.”

She bent over Marinello, her lips pressed against his: a gentle kiss. He brushed her hair off her forehead, felt its texture, smelled the scent of conditioner. Then his hand slid down, brushing her breast, which rose and fell restlessly under her Fiorucci T-shirt. A cherub printed on cotton that concealed a treasure. And Marinello was with her, with his beloved, on the treasure island. But unlike her, he understood how easy it would be to invade that island and take it by force: the Spataro family had no idea what the word “peace” even meant.

The number 3 bus came by every so often; it stopped at a stretch of sidewalk where, for the past ten years or so, a bent orange pole indicated that this was a bus stop. Rosalba checked to see if she had enough coins to pay for the bus
ticket; in her pocket she found two twenty-lire pieces and two ten-lire pieces: sixty lire. It was the afternoon; her father was still at work, and her mother was at home.

A woman carrying a cloth bag full of oranges came up to the crooked bus stop. They waited together. Ten minutes later, the green-and-black silhouette of a Palermo city transit bus drove into view at the end of the street.

It slowed down and stopped by the pole, without opening the doors.

The woman shouted: “Door!” The driver hit the horizontal lever next to the steering wheel, and the rear doors swung open with the sound of someone expelling breath. The ticket vendor, sitting on a tiny bench, tore off two tickets. Fifty lire.
Grazie
, Rosalba said with her eyes.

She went and sat down in the front, on one of the wooden benches. The lady sat down three seats away: they were the only two passengers.

“Young lady, you have sad eyes,” the woman said as she clutched her cloth bag in her hands. “Do you want an orange?”

Rosalba looked at her. She would gladly have burst into tears.

“No, signora,
grazie
, it’s nothing.”

Then, making a supreme effort, she smiled at her sweetly.

In ten minutes the number 3 left the outskirts of Palermo, heading toward the residential districts of the city: the boundaries around Palermo have always been mobile, and closer than they seem. They reached Via Leopardi, then Viale Piemonte. Rosalba got out in front of the bakery where they made the best deep-dish pizza in Palermo.

She lived on the fifth floor. The lobby smelled of chicken broth. The concierge gave her a cheery greeting: “
Addio
, Rosalba!”

A fond, old-fashioned greeting, traditionally accompanied in the street by a tip of the hat.

“
Ciao
, Benedetto,” said Rosalba as she stepped into the elevator.

“Mamma, it’s me.”

“My darling, where on earth have you been?”

Mariapia was a woman who wore an apron when she was at home. She’d never had a job; she’d devoted her life to her husband, the man she’d given herself to when she was just eighteen, and to that daughter who was born to them after they’d been married for a couple of years.

“Sweetheart, you’re dead tired. Come here, let me take a look at you.”

“I’m going to get washed, Mamma, then I’ll tell you all about it.”

Her parents knew that Rosalba had been dating Marinello for almost a year, and that he wasn’t a boy like the ones who attended the Liceo Garibaldi. He had a powerful car and they went on trips all over the island of Sicily; he wasn’t much older than her, it’s true, but in their eyes he was already a fully grown man. And all this worried them. They assumed it might hurt her schoolwork, now that she was about to take her final exams.

Rosalba turned on the water in the shower. She felt the warmth spread over her flesh, the slow flow, the low pressure you find on the fifth floor, so typical of Palermo. She felt safe under that spray of water, the baby-blue ceramic tiles all around her, Papà’s bathrobe hanging on the wall, next to
Mamma’s. The first tear blended with the water that dripped over her face. She tasted the next tears with her tongue, as they began to flow freely. All because of those two bathrobes.

What the hell
, Rosalba thought, doing her best to hold in the tears.

The night spent with him, waiting for the meeting.

The gunfire.

The escape with her heart in her mouth.

Marinello shot, the terror that she was about to watch him bleed to death, the Professore, the fever that had finally subsided. His heartbeat like a caress.

She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in her mother’s bathrobe. Her hair was up, wrapped in a turban made of a towel. Bare, damp feet.

“My darling, should I give you some flannel slippers?”

“No, Mamma,
grazie
.”

Rosalba went into the kitchen and sat down on one of the Formica chairs. Her mother followed her, offering her a glass of water with some Idrolitina, a fizzy powder. Rosalba drank it down in one gulp.

“Where have you been, love of my life? Why didn’t you tell us you’d be staying out all night? You took the car, and then what happened?”

“I was with Marinello.”

Rosalba’s freedom, in the Corona household, had never been questioned. But she was expected to let them know where she was.

“Forgive me, Mamma, I forgot.”

“But what did the two of you do?”

“Nothing, we just went around, went to a party.”

“Did you bring back the car?”

“No, Marinello needed to use it a little longer. I’ll bring it back later.”

“You know, I’ve met this Marinello twice, your father only once. He’s a handsome young man, that’s true, and I’m sure he loves you, but couldn’t you have chosen someone who was more like you? Someone from school?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know myself, but they told your
papà
that he’s actually a blood relative of the Spataro clan that shows up every once in a while in the papers. Powerful people. I’ve heard that they’re in the Mafia.”

Rosalba wanted to find out just what her parents really knew, how far she could push her lies.

“So? What if he really is a blood relative? What does that mean? That he’s a Mafioso, too?”

“No, my love. But you know that it’s dangerous here in Palermo to have anything to do with certain families. You want to teach someday. How can you hope to do that if you’re with a boy who might have a father in prison, or a cousin who’s been murdered?”

“Marinello’s not a Mafioso. I’m sure of it.”

The woman looked at her daughter with love and fear. What did her baby girl know about the Mafia? What could a little girl understand who’d grown up on Viale Piemonte, at the Liceo Garibaldi, on the beach at Mondello, attending parties at Addaura? It was a mystery to her, and she was forty years old. But for Rosalba, an adolescent?