Malavita

by Tonino Benacquista

  “After the shopping, I went to have dinner at the Old Homestead Steak House, at the corner of fifty-sixth and nineth Avenue. Do you know it?”

  Warren had, between the ages of nought and six, been to New York fewer than a dozen times, to a skating rink or a toy shop, and of course that visit to the hospital to consult an asthma specialist, but he had certainly never been to a restaurant, and definitely not this steak house he’d never heard of. So he didn’t answer, but the man wasn’t waiting for an answer.

  “There were just two dishes on the menu – steak weighing less than a pound, and steak weighing more than a pound. I was being asked to choose between a piece of meat of less than five hundred grams, and one of more than five hundred grams. I was pretty hungry after running about twenty-six miles, but still I just took the ‘less than a pound’ and I had to leave half of that.”

  The other man leaped on the story in order to cap it with his own, about a lunch in Orlando.

  “I had just got in from the airport, I was on my own, I went into a pizzeria and saw on the menu that there are three sizes – large, small and medium. Well, I was so hungry that I ordered the large one. The waiter asked how many people it was for and I said I was alone. He burst out laughing. Take a small one, he said, you won’t finish it. And he was right – it was like the wheel of a truck!”

  Warren smiled, exasperated at not being able to answer back. The size of the dishes, that was all they remembered about his country. Just to confirm this, the third man brought them back to New York, to Grand Central Terminal.

  “They told me the seafood there was wonderful. I went to John Fancy’s, which I’d been told was the best fish restaurant in town. Terribly disappointing – totally dull, you find much better seafood at the Taverne d’Evreux. I went to the station to catch a train to Boston, where I was supposed to meet my company’s sales manager. It was one o’clock, I had an hour until my train, so I wandered around belowground in the huge station and chanced on the Oyster Bar. Oysters as big as steaks! The shells were like ashtrays! I never saw such a thing! And in a station! Warren, do you know the Oyster Bar?”

  Warren was tempted to say what was in his mind: “I was eight years old when my family was hounded out of the United States of America.” He was finding it less and less bearable to be treated like a future case of obesity with an IQ lower than that of an oyster in the Oyster Bar, someone ready to sacrifice everything to the God of the dollar, an uncultivated being who felt entitled to rule over the rest of the world. He longed to tell them how much he missed his childhood home, the neighbourhood, his local friends and the star-spangled flag which his father had trampled upon all those years ago. Warren found himself caught in a strange paradox: he was moved to tears by the American national anthem while simultaneously imagining himself building a Mafia state within the state, and then settling various problems that politicians could not deal with, and – who knows? – eventually getting himself invited to the White House.

  To escape from this conversation, Warren found himself reduced to joining the others in awaiting the only event capable of causing a diversion – the arrival of his father. But the great man was biding his time, shut away on the veranda with the blinds down. Maggie felt her temper rising. Fred had left her to do all the work, and the barbecue wasn’t even lit. Only the guests understood his absence, knowing as they did that writers, whether American or not, always planned their entrances carefully.

  They were all wrong.

  Fred Blake, in the pose of The Thinker, was rereading, deeply moved, a paragraph that he had struggled with for several hours. He now felt so close to those memories that the need to recount them had made him completely forget that forty-five people were waiting impatiently to meet him.

  In 1931 my grandfather drove one of the two hundred Cadillacs chartered by the legendary Vito Genovese to follow his wife’s funeral procession. In 1957 my father, Cesare Manzoni, was summoned, along with one hundred and seven capi from all over the country for the Apalachin meeting, which ended in a manhunt. Quite frankly, was I really going to grow up strumming guitars with the hippies? Could you see me in front of the jig-borers in a cardboard factory? Was I about to start keeping my retirement coupons in a shoebox? Was I going to rebel against tradition and become an honest man just to enrage my father? No, I joined the family firm, and what’s more I did it of my own free will, nobody forced me, I was proud to. “You only have one life,” Uncle Paulie had said when he gave me my first gun. I know now that he was wrong: you can have a second one. I just hope he can’t see me from wherever he is, sad fucker that I’ve become.

  At that precise moment, he was no longer acting a writer and playing to the gallery; he now felt that he had completed the very first stage of a job that might make sense of everything he had been through, everything he had suffered, and made others suffer.

  “Go and see what your fucking father’s doing!”

  Belle ran up to the veranda, where she found Fred sitting still and silent, bent over the typewriter. For a moment she thought he was dead.

  “Dad, we’re waiting for you. Are you going to light the barbecue, or what?”

  He emerged from his trance, and drew his daughter to him, hugging her in his arms. Writing that last page had drained him, and left him vulnerable, and for the first time in ages he drew a curious kind of comfort from the embrace of such innocence. They emerged, Fred beaming, with his arm around his proud daughter, and all heads turned towards them. He greeted his guests, apologized for being late, and said a few words to put everybody at their ease. He went over to the barbecue, where he was given a glass of Bordeaux, which he sipped delicately as he prepared the fire, surrounded by a handful of men there to lend their support. In three quarters of an hour, all the meats would be cooked and the rush would start.

  Word had spread throughout the whole neighbourhood, and the freeloaders kept on coming – it was beginning to feel like a village fête. Lieutenants Di Cicco and Caputo rang Quintiliani on his mobile before taking any private initiative. The boss was on his way up the motorway from Paris and swore he’d be there within the half-hour. Meanwhile he instructed them to go over and join the gathering. So they abandoned their observation post and mingled with the guests – nobody paid any attention to them. In order to blend in, Richard grabbed a plate and started to eat, without the slightest embarrassment.

  “Are we allowed to do that?”

  “If you hang around like an idiot with your arms dangling, you’re bound to get spotted.”

  The argument was carried and Vincent elbowed his way towards the ziti.

  Malavita, too, was tempted to make an appearance. She was curious about all the noise that was reaching her through the basement window. She appeared to think for a moment, sitting up, her eyes wide open, her tongue hanging out. But then she decided after all to go back to sleep, because all that noise could only mean something disagreeable.

  The rest of the evening might have carried on in a peaceful and happy atmosphere, with nothing to disrupt it, if Fred hadn’t suddenly started having regrets. About everything.

  Five characters, all male, stood in a semicircle around the fire, their eyes fixed on the coals, which were refusing to light, despite the dry weather, despite the sophisticated equipment and all the efforts of the master of the house, who was, after all, an old hand when it came to barbecues.

  “That’s not the way to do it . . . You need more kindling, Mr Blake, you’ve put the coal on too soon.”

  The speaker had a cap on his head and a beer in his hand. He lived two doors away, his wife had brought an olive loaf, and his children were running around the buffet screaming. Fred gave him a cold smile. Beside him the bachelor who ran the travel agency in the middle of the town took up the ball:

  “That’s not the way to do it. I never use coal at all, I do it like an open fire – it takes longer, but you get much better embers.”

&
nbsp; “That’s not the way to do it,” added an eminent local councillor. “You’re using firelighters – they’re poisonous, and that’s no joke. And anyway, you can see it doesn’t even work.”

  Without realizing it, Fred was proving a universal truth, which goes like this: as soon as one idiot tries to light a fire somewhere, four others will gather round to tell him how to do it.

  “We won’t be eating that sausage before tomorrow at this rate,” the last one said, laughing, and he couldn’t resist adding: “You’ll never get anywhere with those bellows – I use an old hairdryer.”

  Fred paused for a beat, rubbing his eyebrows, in the grip of a violent and mounting rage. At the most unexpected moments, Giovanni Manzoni, the worst man on earth, took over the body of Fred Blake, artist and local curiosity. When one of the five guys gathered around the fire took it upon himself to suggest that only a bit of white spirit could rescue things, Fred imagined him on his knees begging for mercy. And not just mercy – he was begging to be finished off, released from his pain. Giovanni had been in such situations several times in his life, and he could never forget the very particular moan of a man begging to be killed: a sort of long wail, rather like that of the professional mourning women in Sicily, a song whose notes he could pick out from thousands of others. It wouldn’t have taken him more than five minutes to make this one sing that song – this big relaxed fellow with his arms crossed, standing only inches away, unaware of the fate being prepared for him. The local councillor, for his part, was suffering excruciating torture, crouched in his underwear inside a freezer, like Cassidy, the Irish boss of the fishmongers’ union in New York. The local councillor was doing less well than Cassidy, who, with his head wedged against a pile of chicken breasts, had banged on the inside of the freezer for a good two hours before dying and finally ending the long wait for Corrado Motta and Giovanni, who had passed the time by playing cards on the lid of the freezer.

  The man with the cap, unaware of the terrible tortures Fred was planning for him, continued:

  “It’ll never take, there must be some old ash in there.”

  Fred delved far back into the past: he had been twenty-two when his boss had ordered him to make an example of Lou Pedone, a negotiator for the “five families,” who had allowed the Chinese triads to set up shop on Canal Street in exchange for a big wad of drug money. To carry out the vendetta, and in order to set an example, Giovanni had shown quite exceptional powers of imagination: Lou’s head was found floating in the aquarium of the Silver Pagoda restaurant, on the corner of Mott and Canal. And the most extraordinary thing was that it took several hours for the customers to notice the glassy stare coming from inside the aquarium. Fred, who was now beginning to lose it and had started lighting hundreds of matches under scrunched-up paper, could see the man’s head in the aquarium, with his ridiculous hat floating on the surface. But the ordeal was not over: another man, hitherto silent, grabbed the bellows and took over the whole situation without even consulting Fred, who had already had his virility cast into doubt that afternoon. This time it took a superhuman effort not to grab the miserable man by the hair, press his face onto the grill and stick a kebab skewer through one ear and out the other side.

  “Well, well, Mr Blake, you’re probably better at stringing together sentences than making fires. One can’t be good at everything.”

  A few steps away, Warren, still trapped in the conversation about American cooking, was asked a question on a subject he had never even thought about.

  “So, what makes a genuine hamburger?”

  “A genuine hamburger? What do you mean?”

  “There must be an original recipe. Do you have to have ketchup? Pickles? Lettuce? Onions? Does the meat always have to be grilled? Do you bite into it, or do you open it up and use a knife and fork? What do you think?”

  Warren didn’t think anything, but said what came into his head.

  “A true hamburger is fatty if you want it fatty, huge if you want a blowout, full of ketchup if you’re not worried about diabetes, you put onions on if you don’t mind your breath stinking and mix mustard in with the ketchup if you like the colour it makes, plus a salad leaf for the sake of irony. And if you feel like it you can add cheese, grilled bacon, lobster claws and marshmallows, and it’ll be genuine American hamburger, because – us Americans, that’s what we’re like.”

  Maggie, for her part, was acting her role admirably; this barbecue was nothing compared to some of the summit conferences she had had to organize on Fred’s orders. Everything went through the wives, who passed the invitation on to their husbands and all concerned. A barbecue at the Manzonis was nothing less than a Mafia summit with chops on the side. Decisions were taken there that Maggie preferred not to know about. Twice she had even welcomed Don Mimino himself, the capo di tutti i capi, who never moved unless there was a war between the families. That afternoon there could be no problems, everything would have to take place according to a gentle ritual in an open and friendly atmosphere. She had to be more than just diplomatic, she had to use her sixth sense, keeping an eye on everything and making sure the men were able to carry out their business discreetly, business which might include sealing one of their own men’s fate in a block of concrete. What could possibly worry her now, so many years later, here in the midst of these French guests who were so amused by their lapses in taste?

  Meanwhile the coals had finally caught, putting an end to the sarcastic remarks. The steaks were cooking alongside the sausages, giving out such an appetising smell that the guests started gathering in larger and larger numbers, plates in hands, around the barbecue. Fred was gradually beginning to relax, happy to have lit his fire, despite all the bad will around him. The man with the hat had had a narrow escape; without knowing it he had been within a whisker of a death so hideous that it would have made the peaceful town of Cholong famous. He was even one of the first to taste the meat, and couldn’t resist one more piece of advice:

  “It’s good, Monsieur Blake, but perhaps you should have waited until the embers were hotter before putting on the steaks.”

  Fred had no choice now – the man with the stupid hat would have to die immediately and in front of everyone.

  In New Jersey, the man with the stupid hat would not have survived more than two weeks, he would have been taught to hold his tongue from earliest childhood, or he would have had it cut off with a razor-sharp switchblade – the operation wouldn’t have taken a minute. In New Jersey, faced with real bad men of the Giovanni Manzoni kind, the man with the stupid hat would have bitten back all his sly comments, and would have long since given up looking over his neighbour’s shoulder purely in order to make tiresome suggestions. In New Jersey, if you had the answers to everything, you had to prove it on the spot, and idle commentators were a rare breed. Giovanni Manzoni grabbed a poker leaning against the grill, clutched it tightly, and waited for the man in the stupid hat to turn round so that he would see death coming as he was being hit full in the face.

  And too bad if Fred brought everything down around him, if by killing this man he put his family in danger, too bad if he went back to prison for life. Too bad if, once in prison, his anonymity only lasted twenty-four hours and Don Mimino gave orders to liquidate him. Too bad if the whole Manzoni story got back into the headlines and if Maggie, Belle and Warren didn’t survive the shame and the vengeance. The death and ruin of a family were as nothing compared to Fred’s irresistible urge to silence for ever the man in the stupid hat.

  Just at this precise moment a gentle hand landed on Fred’s shoulder. He turned round, ready to hit anyone who stopped the attack.

  Quintiliani had arrived. He was upright, strong and reassuring, with the look of a priest. He had seen Fred’s temper rising, and it was something only he could control. He knew very well how to deal with that sort of rage – in fact some of his FBI colleagues saw it as his special gift. For Tommaso Quintiliani, it was not so muc
h a gift as a matter of dealing with ancient demons. In the days when he had hung out with his gang of friends on Mulberry Street, a man’s life was only worth what could be found in his pockets. If he hadn’t been drawn into the ranks of the FBI by some innate good conscience, he would have joined those of the Cosa Nostra with the same steely determination.

  “Give me a drink, Fred.”

  Fred heaved a sigh of relief. The ghost of Giovanni Manzoni vanished like a bad dream and Frederick Blake, the American writer living in Normandy, reappeared.

  “Come and try the sangria, Tom,” he said, dropping the poker.

  *

  The party had dragged on and Maggie was in bed, yawning, ready to drop off to sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow. Fred took his pyjamas off the chair by the bed, put them on, lay down next to his wife, kissed her on the forehead and switched off the bedside light. After a moment of silence, he gazed up at the ceiling and said:

  “Thanks, Livia.”

  He only used her real name when he felt he owed her. Within that thanks, there was a long unspoken sentence that went like this: Thank you for not leaving me, despite everything you’ve been through, because you know that without you I wouldn’t last long, and thank you too for . . . lots of other things that he would rather not say out loud – saying thank you was, on the whole, beyond his strength. He sensed her dropping off to sleep, waited for a moment, and then got out of bed, put on his dressing gown, and crept down to the veranda like a burglar. All the exhaustion of the day had melted away. He sat down in front of the typewriter, turned on the light and reread the last lines of his chapter.