They asked her to come into the office. The interview took less than ten minutes.
“When could you start?”
“Straight away.”
*
Al Capone always said: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” That simple phrase, to me, explains the continuing success throughout the ages of the phenomenon that is the Mafia.
Fred stopped typing in order to think for a moment, but the last sentence didn’t seem to lead on to anything else. What could he add to something that said so much in so few words? He supposed that was what was called literature. How could he explain to his future readers the magic he saw in these words? All his friends in Newark would have got the message straight away. By quoting Capone, Fred saw how useful it was to have his words backed up by the thoughts of a master. He threw the carriage back, and tackled a new paragraph.
A few yards away, Belle stood stark naked in front of the bathroom mirror, with a seamstress’s tape measure, measuring the vital statistics of her splendid body, without missing out a single curve. She knew the basic measurements – chest, waist, hips, her body mass index (20), the hip/waist ratio (7), but she was curious about the rest: wrist, neck, calf, foot, forehead, thickness of arms, shoulder blade to armpit, distance between nipples and so on. Each time she found she was the perfect size.
Maggie, in the kitchen, was busy at the stove. Pasta aglio e olio. It was all very well spaghetti with garlic and oil being her speciality – neither her husband nor her children would contemplate a plate of pasta without tomato sauce. Fred just fiddled with his food when he was faced with sophisticated meat or herb sauces, or luxuries like truffles or lobster – what he called fancy food. Pasta, for him, meant red sauce, nothing else.
“You know I don’t like that,” he said as he passed through the kitchen.
Maggie was at that crucial moment when you toss the spaghetti and garlic together in the pan before adding the fresh oil.
“What makes you think it’s for you? If you want tomato sauce, you can make some this afternoon, between chapters.”
“So who’s this pasta for?”
“Those two poor guys who are so far from home. Unlike us, they’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
He shrugged and asked what she was punishing him for. Maggie didn’t deign to answer and, covering the dish with foil, left the house and went over to join Richard Di Cicco and Vincent Caputo, who were playing cards, with earphones on their heads.
“Someone ringing my house?” she said.
“Yes – it’s someone called Cyril,” said Vincent. “I don’t want to spill the beans, but he’s been ringing Belle every day for a week.”
“Never heard of him. Let me know if she falls in love, boys.”
Instead of just suffering their presence, Maggie had learned to make use of the FBI. Quite apart from the true respect she felt for Quintiliani and his men, she now felt she was being protected rather than spied upon. Only heads of state normally got such treatment. No need to look through her husband’s pockets or go through her children’s drawers. The FBI could deal with it, and Maggie was safe from all the dangers that wives and mothers live in dread of. She wasn’t proud of it, but neither was she ashamed of having made use of the high-tech methods at the Bureau’s disposal to sort out her domestic problems. Fred’s little acts of cowardice, Warren’s little side-slips, Belle’s little secrets – Richard and Vincent kept her informed.
“I’ve made you some pasta aglio e olio, Vincent.”
“Even my wife can’t make it like you do, don’t know why, maybe she puts the garlic in too soon.”
“How is she?”
“She’s missing me, she says.”
This conversation highlighted the absurdity of their situation. Did those three have nothing better to do in life than hang out in an empty house in the middle of a little Norman town thousands of miles from home? Overcome with silent homesickness, they ate the pasta with little appetite. Maggie’s presence was even more of a comfort than her cooking – just the fact of a woman looking after them, sometimes like a wife, sometimes like a sister. They knew she was sincere, and that trust had, over the years, become a valuable link between them. She would appear, and a wave of comfort and reassurance would help them to forget another silent day of boredom and regrets. Maggie helped them to hold fast and to continue to test the limits of their professional dedication.
In order to understand how Caputo and Di Cicco had come to be there, you had to go back six years, to the end of the “five families trial” as it had been known in the papers. The Manzonis had been taken in hand by the Witness Protection Programme. They had become the Blakes, a little family with no story, who had left the Big Apple to go and live in Cedar City, Utah, a town of eighteen thousand inhabitants, in mountainous country in the middle of a desert. The town ticked the right boxes – it was small enough not to have a crime syndicate but large enough to allow a modicum of anonymity. The Blakes settled into a residential area of rich retirees, and began adjusting to their new life of idleness as best as they could. It was a strange environment, a sort of imprisonment, but completely relaxing after all those stressful months. The shopping was delivered to the house, they signed up to correspondence courses, and they lived like recluses, ignored by the neighbours. Quintiliani had stuck with Fred since the end of the trial. He had been picked for his incredible tenacity as well as his Italian origins, and he had chosen Di Cicco and Caputo as his lieutenants for the same reasons. All three knew the Manzonis better than anyone, having followed them and listened in on them unceasingly for the four years until Giovanni was finally trapped. The Witness Protection Programme had set two goals to establish their reinsertion into society: schools for the children in Cedar City, and a job for Maggie, as long as their identity remained secret.
But they hadn’t reckoned on the determination of the five families who controlled the state of New York.
Each one of them had lost two or three men by the end of the trial, not to mention Don Mimino himself, whose battalion of lawyers had been reduced to silence in the face of the mass of evidence supplied by Giovanni Manzoni as to his position as supreme leader of the Cosa Nostra: Brutus had plunged the knife into Caesar’s heart. And so the five families had got together – money no object; anyone who could supply the smallest accurate piece of news about the whereabouts of the Manzonis could claim a reward of twenty million dollars. After this announcement had been made, squads of four or five hitmen had been assembled for the sole purpose of tracking down the Manzonis. Enzo Fossataro, who was acting boss of the families until Don Mimino named his successor, had made deals with the families in Miami, Seattle, Canada and California, and had created a countrywide network of information and surveillance. He had even, quite openly, placed barely disguised advertisements in several perfectly respectable papers which, although not in the pay of the Mafia, were happy to see the resulting huge increase in their circulation, thanks to this real-life soap opera. Very soon a phenomenon was observed that had hitherto been unknown on American soil: death squads, or “crime teams” as the Post called them, began methodically dividing up the country, visiting the smallest townships, asking questions in the seediest bars, leaving tips and mobile-phone numbers wherever they went. The FBI itself had never come across such a thorough investigation, or such huge means deployed for a single operation. The trackers followed a recognized sequence: two men went into a bar, and put a newspaper on the bar, folded to show a photo of the four Manzonis posing with smiles on their faces at the Newark grand parade. The men didn’t need to say anything, or ask any questions; this simple crumpled piece of newspaper was the instant equivalent of a cheque for twenty million dollars.
If the five families were prepared to spend their last cent on the operation, it was because for them it was more a question of survival than one of vengeance. The blow struck by the Ma
nzoni trial had cracked the very foundations of the organization, and threatened a total collapse in the medium term. If one grass could cause such damage, and then escape with the blessing of the court and spend the rest of his days in protected surveillance at the taxpayer’s expense, the whole concept of the family, and therefore the Mafia itself, was thrown into question. In the past you joined in blood, and could only leave in blood. And there was Manzoni trampling on his oath of allegiance, lounging in front of the TV, probably with his ass in a swimming pool. Many centuries of secrets and traditions would perish in the face of this image. The Cosa Nostra could not allow its reputation to be sullied like this, leaving the prospect of a disrupted future. In order to prove that it still existed, and intended to stick around, it would have to strike hard: the very survival of the families now depended on the deaths of the Manzonis. And so it happened that the so-called crime teams spread out like a generalized cancer to every urban centre in the country, to remote towns, criss-crossing areas hitherto unvisited even by the census-takers. No local or national authority could prevent this deployment – wandering around a town with a folded newspaper couldn’t be said to break any known law. Almost six months after the Blakes’ arrival in Cedar City, strangers had been spotted sitting down in a coffee shop in Oldbush, forty-five miles away, holding the famous newspaper and striking up conversations with bored locals.
“Fuck it, can’t anything be done to stop them? You’re the FBI, Quintiliani, for Christ’s sake!”
“Keep calm, Fred.”
“I know them better than you do! And what’s more, if I was in their place, and I found the son of a bitch who had done what I’ve done, I know exactly how I’d take pleasure in wasting him. I’d probably already be behind that door, about to bust us both. I trained some of these guys myself! Your fucking protection programme . . . Six months, that’s all it’s taken them!”
“. . .”
“Get me out of here. It’s your duty, you promised.”
“There’s only one solution.”
“Plastic surgery?”
“That wouldn’t work.”
“Then what? Pretend I’m dead? They’d never swallow that.”
Fred was right and Quintiliani knew it better than anyone. Ever since Hollywood had taken over that particular script, there was no point faking an informer’s death. The Cosa Nostra would only believe in Fred’s death once they were faced with a bullet-riddled body.
“You’ll have to leave the United States,” Quint said.
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“We’re living in a cynical age, Giovanni. The whole country is now following this soap opera. It’s called How Long Will the Manzonis Survive? It’s a reality show, and three hundred million viewers are watching.”
“And the end of the show is the end of my family?”
“Europe, Giovanni. Does that word mean anything to you?”
“Europe?”
“Exceptional procedure. Don Mimino’s guys can cover this country, but they can’t do the whole world. They haven’t got any connections in Europe except in Italy. You’ll be safe there.”
“You’re ready to cross the ocean to save my skin?”
“If it was up to me, I’d ring one of those crime-team guys right now, I’d do it for free, just to see a scumbag like you with a bullet in your head, which is what you deserve. But the trouble is, you dying would give organized crime twenty years of impunity, with all that crap about omertà and sealed lips. On the other hand, if you get out of it, I’ll get a list of rats long enough to keep me going for the rest of my life and it’ll pay for my retirement. It’s what Washington wants. Your survival is worth a lot to us, and you’re much more useful to me living than dead.”
“If that’s the only solution, then I want to go to Italy.”
“Out of the question.”
“It would give some sense to us being in exile, otherwise there’s none. Let me get to know the land of my fathers, I’ve never been there. I promised Livia the day we got married that we’d go there some day. Her grandparents were from Caserta, mine from Ginostra. They say it’s the most beautiful place in the world.”
“Sicily? Great idea! You might just as well walk around Little Italy with a placard saying HAVING FUN IN JAIL, DON MIMINO?”
“Let me see Italy before I die.”
“If I land you in Sicily, you’ll be made into spezzatini in less than ten minutes. Think of your family.”
“. . .”
“Talk to Maggie, we’ve still got a little time.”
“I know what she’ll say. It’ll be Paris, Paris, Paris – all women dream about it.”
“To be quite honest, I’ve spoken to my bosses, and Paris is one possibility. Also Oslo, Brussels, Cadiz, with a slight preference for Brussels – don’t ask.”
A few weeks later the Blakes were installed in a quiet building in the second arrondissement in Paris. Once past the first few months of adaptation – new life, new country, new language – they got into an everyday routine which, without really satisfying them, helped them get over the trauma of the move. That was before Fred began single-handedly undermining the protection programme.
*
Both arms in plaster, suspended by straps to the bedhead, Didier Fourcade, the most sought-after plumber in Cholong, watched his wife sleeping, not daring to wake her. The pain had subsided thanks to powerful analgesics.
He relived that morning in his mind – how, suffering the pains of hell, he had pushed open the double doors of the Morseuil clinic with his shoulder. He had presented himself at the admissions desk, with his arms in the air, like a flightless bird, torn between pain, shame and terror.
“I’ve broken my arms.”
“Both of them?”
“It hurts, for God’s sake!”
An hour later, in plaster up to the elbows, he had had to face questions from an intern who walked around him without taking his eyes off the X-rays of his arms.
“Fell down the stairs? . . .”
“I fell two floors on a building site.”
“It’s odd, you can see points of impact, as though you had been hit . . . Like hammer blows on the wrists and the arms. Look, there.”
Didier Fourcade turned away to avoid another wave of nausea. He was still haunted by the sound of his own screams as that psychopath had hammered at his wrists. He was taken home in an ambulance, the straps were fixed up and he was put to bed, all under the amazed stare of his wife, Martine.
They had got married twenty years earlier, surprised at wanting to commit to each other only three months after meeting, but unable to prevent themselves. However, as though to counterbalance the euphoria of the first years, the boredom of daily life had caught up with them sooner than with most couples. Both had begun to daydream, imagining a third party entering the equation, imagining a secret life, and in the end living one for real. As long as their relationship was not poisoned by bitterness and reproaches, they had remained together, nostalgic for their lost happiness, and always ready to believe that some small incident might bring it all back. Once their physical passion had died down, they had become prudish with one another: she would lock the bathroom door, turn her back to him when doing up her bra and draw away when she touched his skin by mistake. And for the last few years both had begun to wonder whether any couple could survive this physical distance.
Now he found himself watching her sleeping, just as he had done in those early days and nights, and the sight made him thank God for having sent him Martine. She was resting at last, emotionally exhausted by this accident which had forced her to perform some unusual new gestures: she had had to spoon-feed Didier, wipe his mouth, hold a glass to his lips. She, who had never smoked, had to light a cigarette, put it between his lips, and take it out to tap off the ash. How could he have had such a terrible fall? Supposing he had fallen head fir
st? She had often dreamed of freedom, but now she had been offered a glimpse of life without him and the prospect had filled her with horror.
Didier had bravely faced all that day’s ordeals, until now, at 2:17 a.m., when a horrible itch started up, down by his perineum. About ten years earlier he had picked up a skin complaint from God knows where. The doctors had assured him that the tests were negative, that it was benign, that there was nothing much you could do about it, that it would go the same way it had come, but still, at least once a day and according to ambient heat and sweatiness, he was seized by an irresistible urge to scratch between his thighs. It was an awkward place to have to scratch during the day, and he often disappeared into toilets, or went back to his car for no obvious reason, returning almost at once. The only way to achieve some form of relief was to wash the affected spot with dermatological soap, dry it thoroughly and, in times of great heat, sprinkle it with talcum powder to soak up the sweat and alleviate the friction. He, a plumber, had insisted on installing a bidet in their bathroom, to the great surprise of his wife, who couldn’t see the point of it, and indeed he was the only one who used it (it was a masterpiece of a bidet, ultramodern – he had put his all into it). In the morning, when he got up, the jet of water soothed the patches which he had scratched during the night, sometimes drawing blood. On summer evenings, he would sometimes take a hip bath as a late reward for a sweaty day spent resisting the temptation to put his hands between his legs in public.
By 2:23, the itch had become intolerable. He had felt it coming on since the early evening, but he had held out, like a soldier biting his belt to make pain disappear. His battle with himself had taken the form of cold sweats, a strange shuddering of the shoulders – his whole body was begging for release so forcefully that eventually all qualms were swept aside. He woke his wife, calling her name, begging her to scratch his “perineum” – a word he had learned at the dermatologist’s, along with “scrotum.” Such precision made her hesitate; Didier always called a cat a cat, and a tomcat a tomcat, even with people he hardly knew. This word “perineum” was hiding something, it was a roundabout way of saying “scratch my balls,” but still, she was in no doubt about the urgency of the situation. Guided by her husband, she slipped her hand into his underpants, then under his testicles, a gesture she hadn’t made for a long time. He yelled when she found the crucial spot:
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