by David Hewson
Also I must cite this bold statement, ‘if by the word “mafia” we understand a sense of honour pitched in the highest key; a refusal to tolerate anyone’s prominence or overbearing behaviour … a generosity of spirit which, while it meets strength head on, is indulgent to the weak; loyalty to friends … If such feelings and such behaviour are what people mean by “the mafia” … then we are actually speaking of the special characteristics of the Sicilian soul: and I declare that I am a mafioso, and proud to be one.’
These last are the words of the ‘liberal’ professor of law and son of Palermo Vittorio Orlando who was, albeit briefly, prime minister of Italy, a onetime Minister of Justice, and now, as I write these words in a nation recovering from one more terrible war, a Roman senator for life.
I trust you understand, dear reader. The food is good, the island beautiful in parts, the history, the monuments, the ruins more visible than our own. For all that the Sicilians will always have ideas above their station. One forgets that at one’s peril.
Two days after he fled Reggio, terrified by the sight of men rising from the dead, Emmanuel Akindele found himself in the attic of a derelict warehouse on the south-east coast of Sicily, the steady blue of the Ionian just visible through the single filthy window at the end of the room.
The place smelled of damp and drains and dust. Across the water, over the bridge, was the island of Ortigia, a beautiful-seeming haven for tourists and locals who could afford the rent. But he was in the grim industrial area at the edge of the city, running south. Next door was a burnt-out petrol station and on the other side a wrecker’s yard. Just along, on a patch of waste ground leading to the water, a circus had set up shop. Big tents, not much in the way of an audience that he could see, but there were beasts there. Maybe a miserable lion or elephant. Their cries rang out, night and day. He’d read somewhere that the Italians were, out of kindness, on the verge of banning animals in circuses. While all around them desperate men and a few women from distant, impoverished nations tried to eke out a living any way they could.
In Reggio he’d discovered he couldn’t hot-wire a car as easily as he thought. The ones in Italy were newer, harder than the rusting lumps of metal back home. Terrified he’d be found and someone would ask why he’d run with so much money stuffed inside his jacket, he’d stumbled into the heart of the city, caught a bus to San Giovanni, taken the ferry to Messina, plucked up the courage to buy a ticket for the train.
All the way he’d looked at the faces around him. Especially the men. The way they stared back made him yet more scared. Six hours later, close to midnight, he found himself outside Fontanarossa airport which was pretty much closed. He knew he didn’t dare brave it anyway, trying to pick up a ticket to Africa with nothing but cash. Might as well have put a sign over his head: something bad going on here. So he slept in a bus shelter overnight, trying to swat off the persistent, hungry mosquitoes, and in the morning made a call to the one man he knew living somewhere nearby.
He was desolate but he had money, more than he’d ever known in his life. That was worth something after all.
The man he’d called was his cousin Chuk, two years younger, smarter, always itching to come to Europe even when they were young. They’d made the journey to Libya together, Chuk dealing with the people smugglers, haggling, laughing with them, charming everyone he could with a smile that seemed to fill the whole of his big round face. He was a hefty guy, handy with his fists when they were needed. But usually they weren’t. While Emmanuel held back, shy, scared, reluctant to engage with all these strangers along the way, Chuk walked in, put on that big grin, opened his arms wide, made loud, theatrical gestures, roared with laughter, killed all the fears and doubts before they could grow large and swamp them all.
Chuk was always going to make a go of things, wherever he fetched up. When finally they got on that last boat and had to be rescued off Lampedusa he was the one who somehow talked his way out of the camp, got in touch with men who knew the people smugglers, begged them into taking the two of them off that hot, cramped island, and give them a break. Anywhere. Doing anything. That was part of the deal.
A deal that, for Chuk, turned out to be Sicily where they got separated. Chuk to Siracusa and a tourist-fleecing operation managed by the local mob. While Emmanuel got sold off to the ’ndrina in Reggio. For three hundred euros. He’d learned enough Italian by then to understand just what he was worth.
Chuk had called a couple of times in Reggio, over the moon with the luck he’d had. Emmanuel hadn’t wanted to disappoint him by saying he was stuck behind a grim bar for criminals feeding martinis to a marmoset. So they talked of all the opportunity there was in Italy and, on Emmanuel’s part, how much money they could send back home. Not that Chuk mentioned Lagos much at all. This was his home now. There was no going back.
It took till the afternoon for him to get through so he spent a scary, solitary day hanging round the airport, making himself scarce. Then when Chuk finally answered he caught the bus south to Siracusa, a place he couldn’t imagine. Tourists came here in their droves. He saw them walking out of the airport in their expensive clothes, getting into fancy cars, heading off for the fleets of coaches. But the bus to Siracusa wasn’t so fancy. The one big sight along the way was familiar from home: a vast oil refinery clogging up the coast, kicking smoke and fumes into the air. Then he turned up at a poky little bus station, read Chuk’s instructions from his phone, and walked his way to the edge of town.
It was late by then and the only spectacular thing around was the sunset, a burning ball of fire falling across the mountains and the bay. It took him the best part of an hour to find the derelict warehouse and then a good ten minutes banging on the door before Chuk answered.
‘This a social visit, is it?’ Chuk asked, a little wary.
‘Couldn’t take Calabria any more,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Just need a bed for a couple of days. That’s all.’
Chuk looked him up and down then asked if they’d been feeding him. ‘You look skinny and starved.’
Whereas he seemed happy and well-fed. ‘I just …’
He couldn’t say a thing at that moment. He knew he’d burst into tears. Seeing his cousin, hearing his voice, was a reminder of home, of the family he’d left behind.
They walked a couple of hundred metres down the road to a roadside stand where Chuk bought him a burger and a beer. After that Emmanuel returned with him, took the sleeping bag he’d indicated in the attic and, for the first time in ages, fell fast and soundly asleep.
When he woke the next morning Chuk was up already. Bright sunlight was streaming through the window, cutting a shaft through the dust and flies in the attic. Now it was day he could see the place was filled with cardboard boxes, half of them open, the contents neatly arranged on the hard timber floor. Emmanuel couldn’t work out what was going on. The stuff was African of a kind: masks and gaudy baubles of necklaces and bracelets, carved wooden antelopes, lurid shawls and bandanas.
Chuk was sorting through them, putting them round his hefty arms, singing a little song.
‘Hey, cousin,’ he said when he realized his visitor was awake. ‘Get dressed. You can use my other robe. It’s a bit big for a sparrow like you but the girls will like it.’ Then he walked over to the side of the attic and pulled out a long Arab-style gown in a garish leopard print. ‘We gotta sell a hundred euros of crap before midday or the Sicilians gonna get pissed off.’
Emmanuel shook himself awake and asked where the bathroom was. It turned out to be a tap downstairs. ‘Why are you dressed like that? No one dresses that way. Never seen a guy back home put on that crap unless he was on the stage.’
‘We’re on the stage,’ Chuk said, not pleasantly. ‘We been on it ever since we left Lagos. Don’t you get it? You play your part, man. Or they’re gonna come along and kick you off into the gutter. Put that thing on. Time to go.’
The two of them looked like clowns from the circus across the way. All the same they walked into Orti
gia, across a pretty bridge, and began pestering tourists sitting outside the cafes there. Chuk was so good at this. Even if the people, couples mostly, never wanted to buy a thing – and most of them didn’t – he had a way of making them feel entertained, almost grateful for his smiling attention. So he picked up something out of sympathy and those little numbers soon began to mount. By eleven they’d got a couple of free coffees and two cheap pastries from a cafe guy, another Nigerian Chuk knew down by the port. He’d made his hundred euros twice over. Emmanuel hadn’t sold a thing.
They stopped in the main square by a spectacular cathedral and sat on the steps, Chuk always eyeing the passers-by, noticing the ones who glanced at the gaudy junk on his arm.
‘What do you want, man?’ he asked. ‘I can’t keep you. No one keeps someone else here. It’s Italy. You earn or you starve or beg.’ He slapped Emmanuel’s arm. ‘And I don’t see you being a good beggar either.’
He could feel the wad of notes slapping against him underneath the stupid leopard print gown. ‘I got enough money to pay my way back home.’
Chuk put his big head back and roared like a lion that just heard the best joke anyone had ever told. ‘You been drinking on the quiet?’
‘No. I mean it. I hate it here. I’d rather starve in my own back yard. With people I know. Not be a slave to these criminals.’
‘You think I’m a slave?’ He sounded angry.
‘No. I didn’t mean—’
‘I got money. I get girls from time to time. This life is good if you just work at it. One day soon they’ll get me a shop. All you got to do is earn it. Nothing else.’
But we’re not the same, Emmanuel thought and didn’t want to say.
‘I miss Linda. I miss Jonny.’
Chuk scowled and shook his head. ‘If you go home all the money you send back stops. You think they’ll welcome you?’
‘Yes. I do.’ He hesitated. ‘I said. I got some money. Enough.’
Chuk was staring at him. ‘How much enough?’
‘A couple of thousand. If you can find someone who’ll get me there. A boat might be best. Back to the other side. I don’t think … I don’t like the idea of flying.’
His cousin leaned on his elbows and shook the rings and bracelets and leather belts he was carrying. ‘None of this is mine, you know. It’s theirs. If I steal a single thing they’d cut my fingers off …’
‘It was a gift.’
‘A gift? How much?’
He was never good at lying and besides Chuk had a way of staring at you till you told in any case. ‘Five thousand. You take a thousand for yourself. Just get me out of here. I don’t care how.’
He didn’t much like Chuk but he always trusted him. They were family and family counted. Besides … how many options were there?
‘You’re a good man, Emmanuel,’ his cousin said, patting his knee, staring at him with those genial brown eyes that seemed to charm everyone. ‘You should never have made this journey. It wasn’t for you.’ He laughed. ‘Any more than selling shit to tourists.’
‘No.’
‘Go back to the warehouse. Wait for me there. I’ll see what I can do. Tonight we’ll go and eat somewhere good. Celebrate you going back. I’d do it myself, you know. If I could earn a living there like I do here. Can’t. Just can’t.’
They got up outside the duomo of Ortigia, two tall black men in exotic costumes, and embraced in a way that made a few passing tourists stare. Then, grateful a corner had been turned, Emmanuel walked to the derelict warehouse on the edge of town and waited.
Chuk returned at eight that night, all smiles and good news. It was arranged, he said. First thing in the morning someone would come to pick him up, take him down the coast to a port called Pozzallo. From there he’d catch a fast catamaran to Malta where a man would meet him, arrange a passage to Alexandria and then a flight to Lagos. The journey would cost the best part of three thousand euros, not counting his own cut.
‘So,’ he added, ‘you pay me now and from that I’ll take you for a meal. A good one, cousin. Who knows when we’ll meet again?’
The food was the best part of two hundred euros, more than he’d earned in Reggio in a month. Chuk ate and drank heartily: lobster, squid, exotic fish Emmanuel had never seen before, lots of Sicilian wine, then strange bitter drinks and sweet cannoli filled with ricotta. He didn’t have much of an appetite but Chuk kept forcing drinks on him. So a little woozy and confused, his stomach churning from the strange rich food, he’d gone to bed on the sleeping bag and woken with a stinking hangover.
The bright sun was cutting a shaft through the dusty windows. Two men stood there, arms folded, outlined by its beams, looking down at him.
‘Is it time to go?’ he asked, still drowsy.
His eyes focused.
‘Not quite,’ said Santo Vottari. ‘The Zanzibar misses you, Emmanuel. I miss you. That stupid little monkey too. Screeched so much when I went there yesterday I took it out back and drowned the thing. The black guy we got in your place just doesn’t have your touch. So …’ He crouched down on the floor and smiled. Chuk was in the corner, putting on his robe, riding his rings and bangles and tourist crap up his arms as if nothing had happened at all. ‘What’s up?’
Two more days passed, two more hot and sleepless nights. That first time they slept together they woke to an empty Manodiavolo. Vanni was working somewhere out in the perfumed bergamot orchard down the hill. Rocco had stayed with his friend on the coast. Gabriele was Lo Spettro once more, gone from the place, where she wouldn’t say and Vanni, when he finally returned, seemed not to know.
The hours were empty but delightful. He wanted to know who she was and how this place made her. So the two of them walked the hills where she showed him the places she’d discovered as a child. Empty caverns filled with bats, salamanders and spiders as large as any he’d ever seen. Ravines where waves of pink oleander were in full bloom and spindly tamarisks ran down the river bed. Dense woods of holm oak and pine, beech martens and black squirrels scurrying in front of them across the forest floor. Once, stopping by a low tree at the edge of a mountain torrent, she shrieked with laughter and pointed out a snake, more than a metre long, lounging in the branches.
‘A cervone, city boy. Remember the name. The calmest, most kindly creature you’ll find hereabouts. Look.’ She extended a long finger towards its black-striped head. The serpent’s eyes glistened back at her, a forked tongue flickered, and he waited for it to strike. Then the creature simply yawned, wound its tail more tightly round the branch, and climbed a little higher.
Lucia watched entranced and said, in a reverent low voice so as not to frighten it, ‘The peasants call her sacra and believe she lives for decades, and when she’s very old grows a horn and feathers on her head. Ciao, cervone!’
The snake slithered off into the upper branches at that.
A few words of the local Greek dialect she taught him. Ilio for the sun. Silene for the moon. Agapi for love. Miso for hate. Zoi for life. Tanato for death. Aspromonte didn’t mean ‘rugged’ or ‘acrid’ mountain as the Italian suggested but came from the Greek aspros, white, and referred to the glistening mica sheets found in rock formations on the high crags. Or so she said.
‘The only bitter things here are men,’ she whispered in his ear when they stopped to eat prickly pear and cheese for lunch beneath a glade of fir trees over a panoramic view of the coast. ‘And they’re just travelling through.’
Weary, sated, full of the wild summer days they’d return to Manodiavolo as the sun began to wane. He’d no idea of the exact hour but always Vanni was there, grilling his peppers and aubergines on the charcoal they’d made, fetching coarse country bread from the oven. Never asking questions. Always pleased to see them.
After a while he’d leave them with a carafe of rough red wine, go to his room and listen to loud music: dance bands and jazz. And not long after they’d be in bed where different noises came to life.
On the third day after he kill
ed the swordfish and pretended to murder Peroni and Falcone he woke alone, wrapped in crumpled sheets like a swaddled infant. The sun was high in the sky already. He checked his watch. Eight thirty. He hadn’t slept this late in years. There were voices in the piazza. Gabriele was at the table in the centre again, Vanni by his side. Lucia came out from the palazzo with coffee, fruit and pastries. Then she looked up at his window and waved.
He did his best to bathe in icy water from the bucket and came downstairs. She met him in the hall, kissed him quickly, and said, ‘Let’s just pretend for now. My father …’ She frowned. Her face seemed paler, careworn in the morning light, the scar more pronounced. ‘Something’s happened. He’s got a lot on his mind.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Be Tomasso Leoni. Be him every second of the day till this is over and I’m gone from here. Back in Capri where I belong.’
Another quick kiss then she ushered him out into the daylight where he blinked against the brightness.
‘Maso,’ the old man said and waved a welcoming arm. Rocco was there now, his scarlet Alfa parked in a lazy diagonal by the wellhead. ‘We have coffee. We have cannoli. Fruit if you want it. Mountain ham.’
‘He doesn’t eat meat,’ Rocco said straight off.
Vanni listened and nodded his head. ‘Perhaps that’s because he’s Canadian. People are different in different parts of the world. Or so I’m told. I’ve never set foot outside Calabria as my brother here knows. It seems I’m not … wise enough for that.’
Gabriele reached over and took his arm in a strong grip. ‘And what would you do if you travelled? Who’d look after this place? Who’d deal with those mules of yours? They love you so much.’
Vanni gazed at him. ‘They’re donkeys. Call them asses. Not mules. You’ve spent too long away from Aspromonte.’