“There are a lot of them, Fred, and they’re well equipped.”
“You’ve spent twenty years studying these guys’ methods, and I’ve spent twenty years training and leading them, who’s better qualified than us two?”
Quintiliani pretended to think it over, and made a show of indignation, but he had taken the decision from the moment he had requested the reinforcements: it had been made quite clear to him that the special forces would not intervene as long as the hostages were dangling in the air with guns trained on them. They had even actually made the suggestion that, as an FBI officer, he should operate at his own discretion.
The federal agent now had the opportunity to behave, with complete impunity, in just the same way as those Mafia scumbags – how could he turn down such an opportunity? He, Thomas Quintiliani, would grab this chance to act according to his own set of rules, to be judge and executioner, to pull the trigger without the slightest compunction, or ethical doubts. As a boy, he had, like all the teenagers who hung out on Mulberry, been tempted to join a gang. They were the heroes, not the guys in blue who patrolled the streets with their coshes. And although once he grew up he had finally chosen his side, he had never forgotten his fascination with the made men, the goodfellas. And now here was Fate offering him a chance to exorcise a demon that sometimes reappeared in his most shameful dreams.
Fred, for his part, was also fulfilling an old fantasy: to pull the trigger with a good conscience, on the right side of the law and with the blessing of Uncle Sam. With a bit of luck, he might get a medal. All good things come to those who wait.
Some of the townspeople had fled to neighbouring towns to get help, others had gathered in the centre to try and decide how to react to the siege, but most of the population had simply gone home, turned on TVs and radios and started ringing round. When it very soon became clear that there was nothing more to hope for from the authorities, despite all the procedures and high-level communications, the inhabitants of Cholong finally understood, no doubt for the first time in their lives, that they were on their own.
In a café in the La Chapelle district, thirty people tried to address the situation, and to find some way of reacting to the threat. Some wanted to analyse it, while others called for immediate action before the situation reached a point of no return.
In the meeting room, a hundred others listened to a translation of the Times piece being read out loud, and heard about the Blake/Manzoni past. All felt betrayed. A mafioso! They had welcomed criminals into their midst, opened their school to the spawn of the Devil. The French state must have been complicit, as well as the CIA, the FBI, Interpol, the Pentagon, the UN, and they had all picked on Cholong-sur-Avre! On top of it all, the fête had been ruined and their lives put in danger all because of that cursed family. As indignation reached boiling point, a group of men formed a militia to track down the bastard and hand him over as soon as possible to those hunting him down.
A few individuals chose to act alone, in the secret hope of getting the reward, which would be enough to keep them secure for a very long time.
The odd individual was observed, here and there, behaving strangely, but to no particular effect. Some saw this upheaval as a temporary crisis and rapidly discovered ways of profiting from the situation. Old grudges were brought to light by the urgency and the danger; this could be the perfect moment to settle a personal score.
For the older inhabitants, grim memories of terrible impotence in the face of an occupying power were reawakened. The word “war” was mentioned.
A war indeed, and one no one could ever have predicted here, in this peaceful township, where, just the day before, people were enjoying the good life. A town of seven thousand inhabitants, identical in every way to the neighbouring town, touched by history, but never very hard, evolving slowly through the ages. No better and no worse than their neighbours, the people were simultaneously home-loving and restless. If you believed the statistics, they obeyed all the demographic and seasonal norms, the national averages. A sociologist, at the risk of dying of boredom, could have used Cholong as the basis for the archetypal provincial town. And it all would have continued like this until the end of time if the Cholongais hadn’t suddenly been dragged into a war that was not of their own making.
Having lived through what I am about to relate is no help.
But if I hadn’t lived through it, I couldn’t have made it up.
There are surely some things that can’t be invented and that one couldn’t describe without having been there. Without having felt it all in one’s guts. Quint has to keep quiet, that’s his job. The story he’s told the world, well, I’m the only one who knows what’s true and what’s made up. Apart from him, I’m the only witness.
I just couldn’t resist it. I had to sit down again in front of a blank sheet of paper and tell what really happened, even if nobody ever reads these words. Reader, before you decide that I’m completely mad, just let me tell you the story of how me and Quint tried to restore order to that little town.
First of all, try to imagine what it’s like to make a pact with your worst enemy to kill your own brother. Me, Giovanni Manzoni, team up with a man whose death I had dreamed about so often? When I think about it now, long after it all happened, I still feel sick. I’ll try and hold back all the swear words that come to mind when I have to mention that motherfucking cop (of course it’s tempting, but one mustn’t become too repetitive). I’ll just call him by his name, Tom Quint, originally Tommaso Quintiliani. One day they’ll make me change all the names in this story, but until then…
If only he’d been a product of my imagination, a fictional character. I could have made him do or say anything I wanted. Then I could have paid him back for everything he’s made me suffer in the last few years. But Tom is all too real. You can’t predict what he’s going to do, and I have no idea what makes him tick. Tom is a true dispenser of justice. Can you imagine that? He’s not just the good cop who’s a part of the neighbourhood, the ordinary human being, a bit fallible, you know the type (I certainly do, I’ve killed several of them). He comes from another species altogether. It may sound crazy, but avengers still exist. Tom is the worst type of cop, because he’s the best. It took him four years to finally get me, not a day less, but he got there in the end. Those Bureau guys, they don’t live like other people. You know, a bit of fun, a few dollars in your pocket. Take your kids to the cinema, take care of your bored wife, that kind of thing. No, for them, as soon as they wake up in the morning, all they can think of is the guy they’re chasing. They talk about him a hundred times a day. Putting him in a cell would be, like, the crowning achievement of their lives. As though there weren’t other, worthier aims in life. You start wondering if they’re really human, with those dark glasses so you can’t see where they’re looking. And how about those earpieces? I always wondered what they could hear in those things. Some kind of higher being that the rest of us mere mortals can’t hear?
No, no one knows how a guy like Quint functions. But he claims to know how a Manzoni functions. Compared to Tom Quint, you can see right through me. He caught me by anticipating all my movements, it was as though he could read my mind. If you believe the Feds, they think people like me are thick, limited, predictable – and plenty more sneering words like that.
I’d rather he kept his dark glasses on when he talks to me. On the rare moments when he takes them off, I can’t bear seeing myself in his eyes. I see things… How can I put it?… On good days I’m a psychopath, but most of the time I’m just an animal. He stares at me as one might stare at an animal. A dinosaur, some kind of extinct species, some creature that you only see in a delirious nightmare. And instead of not caring, it puts me in a rage. I don’t know where that rage comes from, and I don’t know how to get rid of it. So I keep it bottled up inside me, and it scares me. Truth scares me, it’s the only thing that does.
You should have seen the look on his face when I told him I was writing! There must be a word for
it – something between scorn and mockery. “You, Fred?…” I’d have preferred it if he’d spat in my face. Me, write? Giovanni Manzoni? How could that be? The story of my life? It was a wretched idea, they all thought so, even my family. Why did they all get so worked up about it? I wasn’t asking anything from anybody. I wasn’t doing any harm. I just disappeared onto the veranda every day. They didn’t have to worry any more about any other stupid thing I might be getting up to. You should have seen them, instead of just fucking off and leaving me alone, the children laughed at me, and Livia – the whole thing made her nervous – she shouted at me worse than ever. Quint ratted on me to his bosses. Everyone got their wind up, all because of me. But I carried on, despite all the bad will. You know when I finally realized what a horrific thing it was for me to write my memoirs? It was when they destroyed them with a bazooka.
Sure, I was traumatized then. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed a catastrophe like that could really happen. And even seeing it, the whole scene right in front of my eyes, hearing everything, I still refused to believe it. You see it, but the brain can’t take it in. The story of my life going up in smoke. When something like that happens, you start imagining things, you look for signs, you try to make some sense of the whole thing. You have to really, otherwise you’d go mad. I decided that, by writing my life story, I had unleashed supernatural powers. I had annoyed the gods, like in the Roman and Greek times. Perhaps it was written: my story should never be told, my memoirs must remain just hovering above my head. It was a way of telling me: Giovanni, who’s interested in this so-called truth? Who gives a fuck about your life? Your story, it’s about the customs of a time gone by, it’s of no interest to people now. You belong to a species that’s heading for extinction, the race will die out with you. In any case, who would be stupid enough to believe in a single one of those days you spent in New Jersey? Even Livia has no idea of what went on. Quint could testify, and how. No one else would have believed me. It all had to be suppressed, probably just as well in the end.
Maybe one day, when everything’s settled down, they might let me publish this, with the word “novel” on the cover, and I’ll have pulled it off. I’ll change everything, the places, the names, the timescale, everything except the actual truth. No one will notice anything, no one will suspect anything, it won’t set off any disastrous reaction. The reader will just say to himself “It’s fiction”, and as soon as the book’s closed, he’ll have forgotten about it. I myself don’t even want to be believed any more. I just want to tell the story, page after page, one thing after another, and then the next thing, on and on to the end. A novel, for Christ’s sake. With heroes and villains, comedy and tragedy – you just have to call it fiction. No need to try and be serious, or to believe that what one’s doing is important. No need to be clever, just tell the story, say what comes next. I’ve learned from experience to wait for what comes next. So many things happened from one year to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next. And while you’re waiting for “The End”, all sorts of things could happen, good and bad, things that seemed good, but got complicated, fuck-ups that proved to be helpful. You just had to wait and see.
Me and Quint, we decided to get them, these Newark executioners. They were crazy to have left Newark, that wise-guy paradise, that perfect world where anything goes. Those long grey streets, those rows of low-rise buildings, with odd gaps everywhere like missing teeth. You had to get up early to see anything attractive about it, even if you had been born there. And yet it was more real than anywhere else – friends were friends for life, the pasta tasted better, the women were more passionate, even the blood seemed redder. And you understood the hidden meanings in people’s words. If you haven’t known Newark, you’re like a wild animal who has been born in the zoo.
God made temptation, the Devil made hell, and Man made Newark. And when you’re cast out of Newark, the rest of the world is like a deep dark hole.
Yes, they were crazy to have set off from there to come and sort me out. I should say, eliminate me. In the real sense of the word. Don Mimino, their patron saint, who was rotting in jail at Rykers, had instructed them to dissect me and make a useful travelling vanity case out of my skin. But since the old guy’s travelling days were over, he changed his mind in the end; he’d started reading books, and old ones too, so he thought new bindings might be a better idea. (Apparently Don Mimino had decided to take advantage of his stretch in jail to tackle the whole of Shakespeare – he would read it all, understand it all, and then begin again, until he finally got to the bottom of it and sucked out every drop of meaning – after all, he had all the time in the world to do it in.) What could be more thrilling than to read Hamlet, holding between your fingers the cured and tanned skin of the man who caused your downfall? The Don hadn’t stinted on the expenses, and the families from the Five Boroughs had sent their best men, each one hand-picked for his speciality. I was, of course, flattered by this gathering of talent on my behalf.
“How many are there, you reckon?” Quint asked.
“Something between the Magnificent Seven and the Dirty Dozen.”
He and I set off arm in arm through the streets of Cholong – you had to see it to believe it. (Talking of which, I’d like to say, just as an aside, that I’ve always found the name Cholong unpronounceable, especially for an American like me, so I’ve renamed it So Long.) Tom had his weapons hidden under a long coat loosely done up around the middle because of the submachine gun attached to his front. You should have seen his cool expression! Trying to look normal when he was carrying a fourteen-pound long-range rifle as well, slung across his shoulder – it was a sniper rifle, the sort of thing with a shape that’s hard to pass off as anything other than a fourteen-pound sniper rifle.
“We ought to make a plan, Fred.”
“Plan? What plan? The only plan I’ve got is to shoot on sight, and shoot well.”
“I wonder if I’m making a big mistake sticking with you. You go by the La Chapelle district, I’ll come through the square, we’ll meet in half an hour behind the Town Hall.”
“Just one piece of advice they may not have given you at Quantico. If you kill one of them, kill him a second time. It might seem odd at first to shoot a dead body, but you’ve no idea how useful it can turn out to be.”
He went off and I heaved a sigh of relief. It was the first time he’d left me alone for a long time. Out of his control. And armed to the teeth! Forget Fred Blake, I was back to being Gianni, the real me. Giovanni Manzoni! I would have shouted it in the streets if I could. It had been a long and painful wait. But I had never given up. Every minute of those six years, I had imagined starting over like before. It’s what had kept me going, the hope that one day I’d get my real life back again. And that day had finally come.
The fact is, ordinary life, the everyday life that other people lead, is beyond me. Everyday life for everyday people, it’s a mystery: what could possibly be going on in their heads and in their hearts? How could they trust in a world that had to be obeyed? What did honest people do? How could they live with feeling so vulnerable? What does it do to you to be a victim? A victim of your neighbour, of the world around you, of the state? How could anyone accept such an idea, and accommodate himself to it for his whole life? What do honest men do when you show them they’re tilting at windmills? That they will never be able to move mountains?
There’s nothing to protect you, little man. You may think there is, but you’re wrong. Did no one ever explain to you that you’re a straw figure at the mercy of bastards like me? And there are so many of us bent on harming you, even fine men who are on the right side of the law, but to whom you mean nothing except an opportunity to make a profit. I’m sorry for you, truly I am. Before all this, I knew you were suffering, but I had no idea how much misery there really was in the world. And yet God knows you try – I’ve watched you. You retain your faith in humanity, you try and sort things out, to do your best. And then all your
efforts come to nothing, ruined by all those who couldn’t care less about your faith in humanity. You cry – who’s going to listen to you? Who’s going to bust a gut to help you and your little family? So you say everyone’s got troubles, often a lot worse than yours, and you sink your head between your shoulders, and you march on, little man, because you’re a little soldier and you have to endure. Until the next time.
I’ve tried it myself. Couldn’t do it. Never had that sort of courage.
My head full of all these problems, I came around a corner and found myself face to face with one of the killers who were after me. And this was one I knew well – we had been inseparable as teenagers. Nick and me, we’d smashed a lot of heads in together. Sometimes we’d be together for forty-eight hours at a time. We’d look out for one another if ever we strayed into another gang’s territory. That sort of thing creates a bond in the end.
When Nick saw me, he didn’t have time to get out his gun, and neither did I. So we smiled at each other, and shook hands – You look well, how are you, what’s become of you since the old days – each waiting for the right moment to draw, and the moment didn’t come. Boxers call this the “vista” (the vista determining whether they should take a risk or not), and so there we were, face to face, neither of us lowering our defences. But the odd thing was that our friendly chit-chat was perfectly sincere. We reminded each other of a secret we had in common.
We were twenty, and we were hungry. We were as fierce as Rottweilers, and ambitious too – yes, we were ready to turn the world upside down. But, pending that, we ran errands for the boss of the Polsinelli clan – we did all his dirty work. That time, we had been told to track down a bookie who had scarpered with the twenty-five per cent cut he owed the boss (business had been good for the last three years). The crazy thing was, the little fellow had gone to hide at his parents’ house! Nick and me, we couldn’t believe it! The biggest cretin in the world couldn’t have done anything stupider. It was a little house in some dump in Mercer County, exactly two hours’ drive from the taxi depot that served as Polsinelli’s headquarters. The weird thing was, when Nick and me rolled up, the parents, a retired couple, asked us in, and suggested we wait for the boy to come back from some errand in town. Taken by surprise, Nick and I found ourselves being served coffee and biscuits, the little old couple really happy to meet some friends of their son, and telling us all sorts of stories about his childhood and all that. So obviously, when he finally turned up, nobody knew what to do. The son knew at once why the two guys on the sofa were waiting for him. And you’ve got to hand it to him, Nick put on a good show, he gave the guy a big hug and so did I. He let us do it, and the parents were happy to see the friends reunited. Nick suggested we go and have a drink in the town, and the guy got in the car without any fuss. He said goodbye to his parents, trying not to cry, and the mother had even thought it a bit odd that her son should kiss her when he was just going off for a cup of coffee at the corner. Once he was in the car, the guy hadn’t tried pleading for his life, or saying he’d pay the money back – he knew perfectly well it was too late for all that. I was sitting on the passenger seat, not feeling very proud of myself, and I looked at Nick, who wasn’t happy either. It was the little old couple who had ruined everything with their stale biscuits. You should have seen the mother’s expression, so happy that her son had such well-dressed and polite friends. What were we going to do now?
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