The Four Corners of Palermo
Page 1
Copyright © 2012 Bompiani / RCS Libri S.p.A.
Originally published in Italian as I quattro canti di Palermo by Bompiani/RCS Libri S.p.A. in Milan, Italy, in 2012.
English translation copyright © 2014 by Antony Shugaar
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text Designer: Julie Fry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Di Piazza, Giuseppe, author.
[Quattro Canti Di Palermo. English]
The Four Corners of Palermo / Giuseppe Di Piazza; translated by Antony Shugaar.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59051-665-2 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-59051-666-9 (e-book) 1. Criminals—Italy—Fiction. 2. Mafia—Italy—Fiction. 3. Palermo (Italy)—Fiction. I. Shugaar, Antony, translator. II. Title.
PQ4904.I21666Q3813 2014
853′.92—dc23
2013050577
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
To Roberta, Luigi, Carlo, and Giorgio
I shall relate it now, with the accidents of time and place that brought about its revelation.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
—HENRY MILLER
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Marinello: A Western
Milan, December 2010
Palermo, June 1982
Sophie: A Love Story
Milan, December 2010
Palermo, July 1983
Vito: A Marriage
Milan, December 2010
Palermo, October 1983
Rosalia: A Daughter
Milan, January 2011
Palermo, February 1984
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
MARINELLO
A Western
MILAN, DECEMBER 2010
The first time I heard his name I assumed it must have been a misprint, one of those typos that officials in the city registry are liable to commit now and then, thoughtlessly meddling with the fate of human beings. Such as Condoleezza Rice, whose father, an opera lover, had intended to call her Condolcezza Rice. An “e” instead of a “c.” A detail that deprived that little girl of dolcezza—sweetness, gentleness—and instead condemned hundreds of thousands of people to brutal deaths fifty years later.
His case was quite different: he was named Marinello on purpose. A lovely name really, playful, indulgent, a name that might look like a mistake, given it’s so often a woman’s name. But it was actually chosen quite intentionally, by a father who dreamed of an unconventional future for his baby, a child with curly dark hair and eyes as black as pitch.
The father got his wish.
As Marinello grew up, he became an armed robber, but not a professional killer like all his cousins, his uncles, and his brothers-in-law. It was a decision he’d made for himself: “I’m not going to kill.” A decision that changed the lives of several people in that long-ago summer of 1982, some of whom survived, while others did not.
PALERMO, JUNE 1982
The policeman had just come off his night shift. He worked in the squad car division, but he actually was a member of a secret team, called the Squadra Catturandi. Mafioso hunters. Our relationship was somewhere on the border between acquaintance and friendship. It wouldn’t take much to push it back onto the neutral terrain of mere acquaintance, or to release it into flight in the skies of true friendship. He’d called and asked me to meet him at the café across from police headquarters. His name was Salvo; he was twenty-three, the same age as me. Too young to be talking about death, autopsies, and torture. And yet.
“Do you know the Spataro family?”
The winningest family of all the victors in that bloody year of 1982. A venerable old-school Mafia clan that had been quick on its feet, rapidly establishing an alliance with the ferocious newcomers from Corleone. The Spataros, a dynasty that was to Cosa Nostra what the Tudors were to the English throne.
“Tell me all about it, Salvo: What have they done now?”
“We hear there’s been a shoot-out within the family.”
That wasn’t possible; the rules were simple and they always applied: Winners kill losers. Rarely did a loser kill a winner. But it was out of the question for people to shoot each other if they were on the same side, within the same steccato.
For us reporters working the organized-crime beat, this was gospel, this was the Ten Commandments, this was an underlying principle of everything we knew about the Mafia in the early 1980s.
“Come on, you’re pulling my leg.”
“No, we found the shells. On Piazza Scaffa, a firefight from hell. One on one. And a muffuto told us that it was Spataro against Spataro.”
Muffuto was Palermitan dialect for sources, informers, literally “moldy ones,” Mafiosi who had “gone bad” or, depending on your point of view, “gone good.”
“Why do you think they were shooting at each other?”
“We don’t know.”
“Did you find dead bodies, blood?”
“Faint marks, someone must have been hit. But not much blood.”
When I went back to the newspaper, I knew one thing for sure: I was completely confused. I talked it over with the news editor. He told me to look into it, find out what the investigating magistrates had to say. I started doing my legwork, the digging that was destined, as usual in Palermo during the gang wars, to turn up absolutely nothing.
Rosalba was caressing Marinello’s forehead.
“Blood of my blood,” she said, pressing her lips against his golden skin.
He smiled tenderly at her. That girl was the one good thing, the first good thing in his life, the future in his own two hands, a sprig of hope for a change.
“Rosalba, we’re going to get out of here together. We’re going to have children, and we’ll do it in a place where no one speaks Sicilian.”
Then he grimaced.
He was stretched out on a bed in a damp cellar in the outskirts of Palermo. All around them were apartment buildings constructed in violation of the building code, seedy in the morning light, scant surviving patches of orange groves, junked cars. He touched his right leg.
“Totuccio, that son of a buttana.”
The bullet had hit him in the thigh, one hole where it went in, another where it came out. Given the size of the wound, the gun must have been a .38. Rosalba got a handkerchief and soaked it in water. Wringing it out over his face, she sprinkled cool drops onto his burning cheeks, taut with pain.
“Marinello, if you want, we can call my father. He knows a doctor.”
“Forget about it, we’ll wait for the Professore. He’ll bring the shots.”
The girl had dressed the wound, disinfecting it with a pint of denatured alcohol and bandaging it with a couple of rags. The rags were soaked in blood: a .38 is a .38.<
br />
“Still, I’m pretty sure I must have hit him, too.”
“Don’t think about it now, my love. We have to get out of here.”
“First I want to kill him. Totuccio is just too tinto, too dark, too evil: my uncle is using him as an exterminator. But now I’m going to exterminate him.”
He grimaced again. Rosalba embraced him, felt his feverish midsection, the tremor of racing adrenaline. She lay down next to her man and closed her eyes. Her thoughts fluttered away in freedom, as if in self-defense. Before her mind’s eye appeared the Castiglioni-Mariotti Latin dictionary: she had no idea why the giant definite article “IL” was all uppercase and she couldn’t remember what “apud” meant. Then she tried to remember the ablative case of “domus.” Marinello had fallen asleep. His heartbeat seemed to caress her.
Rosalba Corona had just turned eighteen, and in two months she’d be taking her high school finals. That morning, in the cellar next to her wounded lover, she was facing her first test. The most important one of all. And she knew she hadn’t studied hard enough.
She’d met him in a bar at Addaura, the previous summer. She was just a kid, a high school student from the Liceo Garibaldi, the school for Palermo’s well-to-do; her straight black hair was pulled back in a ponytail like Ali MacGraw’s in that film where everyone in the theater is sobbing at the end. Eyes that made you think of a couple of thousand years of history, Phoenician eyes, elongated, dark, eyelashes black with a natural mascara. She was tall and slender, with sharp young breasts that defied any attempt to conceal them. Her breasts had something to say, and she was doing nothing to keep them from talking.
“My name is Rosalba Corona; I’m seventeen years old. I want to be a teacher,” she’d told the young man with dark curly hair and a complexion the color of chestnut honey. He reminded her of Tony Musante, an actor who had been a legend to her mother, only he was taller than Musante.
“I want to teach Italian literature. I like spending time with children.”
He’d walked up to the counter and ordered a rum and Coke. She was already standing there, with her girlfriend Annina, a classmate who was blonde and slightly overweight. Annina’s family had a house on the slopes of Monte Pellegrino, just two hundred yards away from that bar overlooking the surf. Both girls were drinking Fantas.
“The two of you, no alcohol, right? You’re too picciridde, just little kids …” Marinello ventured.
Annina shot him a disgusted look, like a cat presented with a brand of cat food it can’t stand.
But Rosalba smiled.
“No, it’s just that we prefer Fanta,” she lied.
Marinello, deep inside, celebrated this encounter. He arched his spine, feeling the handle of the Beretta .32 touch the muscles in the small of his back. He kept the gun tucked into his belt behind his back, the way undercover policemen do, and he didn’t want the two girls to notice.
“No, you really ought to try it: rum. It’s sweet, and it makes you grow up right away.”
Annina stepped away from the bar with a vague excuse, gesturing toward nothing and noplace in particular, where an alleged “Gaspare” ought to be: she called his name.
“I only try things from boys I know. And I don’t know you,” said Rosalba.
“Pleasure to meet you; my name is Marinello Spataro, I’m twenty-two. I’d like to become your friend.”
She sensed that his dark eyes spoke some undefinable truth, but she couldn’t pin down just what truth that might be. His singsong Palermitan accent was clearly from the poorer part of town, but it was elevated by a denim shirt with flap pockets and mother-of-pearl snaps, worn untucked over a pair of white pants.
“My name is Rosalba Corona; I’m seventeen years old. I want to be a teacher.”
She said it unhesitatingly, as if staking out her territory: I’m studying, I have a future; I’m not just some chick you might pick up in a bar.
“It’s nice to meet you, Rosalba. But don’t tell me you want to start teaching tonight?”
She smiled. He took her hand, as if to shake it, but instead he caressed it. He felt the girl’s skin as she, instead of looking elsewhere if only to simulate shyness, looked him straight in the eye. Phoenician eyes met pitch-black eyes.
The speakers blared out the voice of Giuni Russo, singing that summer’s hit “Un’estate al mare.”
Some of the young people around the bar were singing the song and swiveling their hips; a young blonde woman dressed like a Sperlari mint candy was hoping someone would invite her to dance, if only for the sugar rush.
Marinello and Rosalba were deafened by the noise thundering out of their hearts. The kind of thing that happens in romantic fiction, not in crime novels.
She didn’t start teaching that night, but three nights later, after thinking it over carefully, she decided that she had fallen head over heels in love with Marinello, as she had already suspected the instant his hand first brushed hers, over a Fanta at the bar.
Everyone lived together. Good people and bad. Victims and killers. Daughters of respectable civil servants and sons of bloodthirsty Mafiosi. A borderline had never been drawn, in Palermo. Before he was murdered, the prefect of Palermo, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, said in one of his very rare interviews that he never accepted dinner invitations: in Palermo you never know whom you’re shaking hands with. We all went to Mondello, to Addaura. We all frequented the same bars.
That summer, a close friend knocked on my door; he was distraught.
“What happened?”
“I just saw Michele Greco,” he replied in a whisper, flopping onto my sofa.
He’d gone out for a granita in a café on Via Libertà, one of the best-known cafés in the city. Michele Greco, also known as Il Papa, “the Pope,” a fugitive from the law and the unquestioned capo of the family that ran Croceverde Giardini and, therefore, of the Palermo Mafia, was spending his afternoon like any other retiree, seated at a table in a bar, savoring a pastry and an iced espresso.
“I ran away terrified.” It never even occurred to him to call the police.
There was promiscuity, mixing freely and with impunity. Very few were trying to hunt down the mob bosses: in many departments and agencies of the Italian state, it emerged years later, Cosa Nostra informants had burrowed deep.
I spent the afternoon at the hall of justice, in search of magistrates who knew me and would be willing to reply to my buon giorno in public. Later, in private, we’d talk about the shoot-out between two Spataro cousins and what possible motive might be behind it.
I didn’t pick up much information. Around seven I went back home, to an apartment in a building dating from the turn of the twentieth century, a place I shared with my best friend, Fabrizio. Sandalwood boiserie paneling on the walls gave it a very Gotham City look and feel. Fabrizio’s grandparents had both died there, more than fifty years after building the place, and in the early 1980s, with the apartment unoccupied, the two of us were allowed to live in it. We touched nothing, not the sandalwood, not the Art Nouveau furniture. We added our LPs, our hi-fi systems, our paintings, and the bohemian lifestyles of a couple of guys in their twenties without any clear objectives.
I woke up early every day to go to the newspaper, which had to be put to bed at the printers no later than 1:00 in the afternoon. My alarm clock rang at 6:30, and I usually made it in by 7:15, with a wave and a “good morning” to Saro, the newspaper office’s doorman. “Sleepy eyes,” he’d say with a smile, twirling his mustache to launch an unmistakable allusion into the air, affectionately: “Sexy eyes, sexy eyes.”
Palermo was still enveloped in the gentle warmth of early summer: in a few days, the vise grip of summer heat would tighten. You could die from the heat and the stench of garbage. But in the same city that appeared bent on killing you, you could also live in what seemed like paradise. And it was one of those evenings.
Paradise was what Paolo had promised me: “I’ll take you to Mondello for a drink, at the Bar La Torre. There are four girls
from northern Italy, just passing through. Each of them prettier than the last. They’re here to do a photo shoot, for an ad.”
Paolo was one of my closest and most valued friends. He studied philosophy without much drive, but he did distinguish himself for his remarkable speculative abilities: he was the first in Palermo to explore successfully what he called the “phenomenology of windsurfing.” With an appendix that he planned to present as his supplemental thesis: On Windsurfing: A Theoretical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Pick-Up Artistry. We had a date for ten that night at the Hotel La Torre—back then, as far as I was concerned, one of the finest hotels on earth. A hundred or so rooms on the point of the Gulf of Mondello, with the surf crashing beneath every single window. Mount Pellegrino, looming above the beach, is something straight out of a German landscape painting from the late nineteenth century. Seen from there, Palermo is the standard, classical illusion that, over the centuries, fooled thousands of travelers who passed through on the Grand Tour. A place of exemplary beauty. “Exemplary”: an adjective used, in obituaries, to describe fathers and husbands guilty of countless faults and sins.
At ten o’clock, I parked my Vespa 125 GTR in front of the hotel. Paolo was already at the bar, surrounded by the four girls. There was also a tall guy, introduced as the photographer who was doing the advertising shoot. A guy who was too tall for any of us to know what was flickering inside his eyes. No one born in Sicily was tall enough to exchange a glance with him on a horizontal plane.
The girls were called Marta, Francesca, Benedicta, and Filomena: they all looked out of place in a city that had nothing of the advertising photo studio about it. We talked, we drank. The photographer left early, taking Benedicta with him—she looked like Queen Soraya of Iran, only younger, and was as eager to leave as he was to take her.
The five of us remained at the bar with a bottle of Passito di Pantelleria. The topics of conversation: love, the future, our hopes and dreams. Marta wanted to marry a soccer star. Filomena was engaged to be married to a textiles entrepreneur, and in fact the photographer was working on an advertising campaign for her fiancé’s company. Francesca had nothing to say. She nursed her passito as if she wanted to make that glass last for a couple of years. Every time she set her glass down, our eyes met, in part because I wasn’t looking at anything but her eyes. Limpid, as green as a piece of Martorana marzipan fruit. “What about you, Francesca?”