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.
&nb
sp; “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?
“And anyway, I love him. My classmates are all idiots, but he and I do good things together, and when I’m with him I feel that life is beautiful … but at the same time horrible.”
“Horrible how, what are you trying to say?”
“No, nothing.”
Rosalba understood that she’d been tossing around adjectives again. She knew it was a bad habit of hers. Natalia, a classmate who had moved to Palermo from Venice, had told her that Sicilians have a defect: they tend to overuse adjectives. It wasn’t something she believed, Natalia had explained to her; it was something her mother had said. Her mother was a hard woman, born in Mestre, who rarely if ever hugged her.
“But maybe that’s exactly why I like Sicilians: they make even the simplest things warm and interesting,” Natalia had added.
Rosalba loved that Venetian beanpole. But she knew that she herself overdid it with her adjectives.
“Mamma, saying that life is horrible doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just a figure of speech. All I know is that for now I want to stay with Marinello. I’m going to see him now, we have a date. Unless you need it, I’ll keep the Ford Fiesta tonight and tomorrow. You have the Fiat 126. You can use that.”
Mariapia looked down at the table, and touched the bottle of water and Idrolitina. She moved it an inch to one side, as if she was setting the table. Everything around her was orderly and tidy. She looked her daughter in the eyes: long, deep eyes. So filled with blackness that they scared her.
“All right, my love. If we need to go out, we’ll use the Fiat 126. But remember that your finals are coming up, and you have studying to do.”
Rosalba got dressed: bell-bottom jeans and a tight yellow tank top.
She embraced her mother: she could sense the smell of home in her hair. She went to the bus stop for the number 3, marked by an orange pole, this one standing straight up, and a bench. And she took the one going back to the outskirts of town.
“Why is Marinello still alive?”
“He was lucky.”
“There’s no such thing as luck.”
“I swear it. May I be struck dead on the spot. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise you’re worth nothing.”
“Patri, you have to believe me: I’m still the best.”
“Don’t talk crap: we tell you to go kill that traitor to his family and when you come back you’ve let him shoot you.”
“It was nothing, he just grazed me.”
“Sure, but he shot you, all the same. And you, after practically finishing him off, you let a little girl screw you.”
“She was coming right at me with her car.”
“A fine way for the killer of killers to wind up: hit by a car. You make me laugh, Peduzzo.”
Totuccio didn’t want to make anyone laugh. Being forced to justify himself in the presence of Don Cosimo Spataro, his father and the capo di tutti capi of Palermo, city and province, was not something he deserved. He’d always killed everyone he was sent to kill. He’d never had to explain anything.
Don Cosimo looked at him with expressionless eyes. There wasn’t even contempt in his gaze. There was nothing, and that might well be worse.
“Get me the zammù, Totuccio.”
The super-killer stood up fast, like a Rottweiler obeying an order given in its mother tongue. He went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of cold water and a small bottle of Unico anise.
“Patri, how much?”
“Leave it be. I’ll take care of it.”
The water turned from transparent to milky white with each drop that the don tilted into the glass. The scent permeated the room. They were sitting at the dining room table, and the lace doily at the center was the handiwork of Donna Rosalia Coppola, mother of Totuccio, wife of Don Cosimo, but most important of all, the eldest daughter of Don Tano Coppola, capo di tutti capi of both Palermo and its surrounding province; or at least he was until the day his beloved son-in-law Don Cosimo Spataro decided that there should be only one capo di tutti capi.
That was one of the first jobs assigned to young Peduzzo: murder his grandfather, that country gentleman who every November 2 gave all his grandchildren, Totuccio included, the weapon of their choice. November 2, in Palermo, is a major traditional holiday. It’s a pagan festival, a day of dark candies sold on the street and gifts given to children: toy rifles, air pistols, weapons and nothing but weapons. Rosalia Coppola refused to view her father’s corpse: she understood; she showed not the slightest hint of rebellion. A wife she was and a wife she remained. The wife of the new capo di tutti capi of Palermo, city and province.
Totuccio looked at the doily and thought about his mother upstairs with his still-unmarried sisters, Carmela and Maria, teaching them the art of embroidery.
“Patri, tell me what I have to do.”
“What’s the name of the picciotta that traitor is going out with?”
“Rosalba Corona.”
“You know what the problem is: Marinello refuses to kill and to swear the oath. We can’t let a stranger into our home, a girl from a family where no one has been combinati, made Mafia. This Corona, what’s worse, I hear that he’s causing us trouble over our water deals. He’s killing us on the price. We’ve been seeing fewer profits ever since he got the job.”
“What can I do?”
“Kill him and his wife: Marinello and that buttana of a girlfriend of his will get the message. Right?”
“Right.”
Don Cosimo finished his glass of water and zammù. He was giving a second chance to that son of his, who really was a good picciotto.
“How spectacular should I make it?”
“Not very—after all, the ones who need to understand will understand.”
The man who turned the light on was called Tommaso Buscetta. Until the day he started telling us how things worked in the Mafia, we had stumbled through the darkness of ignorance. The first thing that the Boss of Two Worlds explained to Judge Giovanni Falcone was that the word “Mafia” didn’t exist: the members referred to it as La Cosa Nostra. The second thing was that the Mafia was run by the Commission, also known as the Cupola. The third thing was that in order to become a Mafioso, you had to swear an oath.
That wasn’t all. The first great Mafia pentito, or informer, made it clear that in order to become a Mafioso, that is, “combinato,” there are certain absolute prerequisites: you couldn’t be a blood relation o
f anyone who worked for the state; you must lead a moral life, without too many lovers, illegitimate children, or girlfriends on the side; you must display courage, obedience, and criminal valor.
After a short observation period, the future picciotto was summoned to swear the oath, which consisted of a brief ritual performed in a private home. There he would meet at least three men of honor of the “family” he was about to join. The eldest of those present would utter certain phrases, explaining that Cosa Nostra was founded to do good, to protect the weak. Then, with a thorn from a bitter orange tree, he would draw blood from the candidate Mafioso’s finger and let a few drops fall onto a holy card, which would in turn be lit afire. The new Mafioso must complete his oath with the ritual words: “May my flesh burn like this sacred image if I fail to keep faith with my oath.”
Marinello had replied: “No, thanks.”
Evening at the newspaper. I was leafing through the sports section of the Giornale di Sicilia: the Palermo soccer team had been left behind, in the minor leagues, instead of being promoted to Serie A. I was reading the sports articles as if they were so many obituaries. At seven that evening I had an appointment to talk with a couple of kids from the Liceo Garibaldi who knew Rosalba Corona. Ahead of me lay a half hour of boredom.
Her phone number was scribbled in the top right-hand corner of the calendar, almost as big as my desk, on which I put everything: typewriter, cups of coffee, notepads, pens, cigarettes.
I asked the switchboard to give me an outside long-distance line: 02.
“Is the lawyer in?”
“How are things going in the murder capital, stupid?”
“Ciao, Francesca.”
“You Palermitans, do you go to the beach or do you just suffer in silence?”
“Sometimes the beach comes to us: last year, the waves came and took two kids off the outer breakwater. Massive waves, full-blown tempest, atmosphere straight out of Melville.”
The Four Corners of Palermo Page 3