Malavita

by Tonino Benacquista

  “Don’t go there yet. The temperature inside will be up to two thousand degrees.”

  Greg knew the AT-4 Viper of old. He had used it during an attack on a bullion convoy: it had completely melted the driver’s cabin, like something in a cartoon. For this one brilliant single shot he had spent days training in a bus graveyard in the middle of the Nevada desert. Considering his contribution over, he packed the launcher back into its container. All he had to do now was wait for confirmation of a single fact – that Giovanni Manzoni had been destroyed.

  A second before the conflagration, Fred had been lying on the ground, his eyes sore from so much crying. He had made the terrible decision to leave Cholong immediately and break out of the Witness Protection Programme, to give up expecting any help from the American government. After Maggie’s denunciation, all that was left for him was to flee, leaving his family to live out in the open, without the awful sensation of being watched night and day by a third party. By going it alone, he would be removing his family from danger, giving them back their lives. He just needed to go by the house to fetch a few things before evaporating into the background. Then came the explosion, so sudden and so intense that he stopped dead, frozen to the spot. Feeling weightless, he slid along the side of Quint’s headquarters to have a look down the street; he saw that the very spot in which he had spent most of the last few months was now no more than a dusty cavity, a hole filled with rubble. Suddenly he heard a strangled cry, which he recognized. He ran into the Feds’ house, where he saw a hysterical Maggie trying to escape from Quint’s grasp. He was holding her flat on the ground, his hand over her mouth. Fred threw himself down to help him put his wife out of action, and prevent her from screaming for help. Quint pulled his hand back and stunned Maggie with a blow on the back of the neck. Then he placed her head carefully down on a corner of the carpet. He left the room for a moment and returned with a first-aid kit, from which he drew a metal box containing a syringe. Maggie had to be protected from herself, and straight away.

  “She’ll sleep for at least six hours.”

  They crawled a few yards over to the window, and raised themselves up just enough to glimpse, at an angle, a minibus surrounded by a handful of armed men who were about to approach the rubble.

  “Apart from Matt Gallone and Franck Rosello, I don’t know the others,” Fred muttered.

  “The little dark one is Jerry Wine, and the one putting away the RPG is Greg Sanfelice.”

  Quint wondered how these lowlifes had found their way to the Manzonis. Six years of work had been wiped out before his very eyes. He couldn’t believe that anyone in Washington or Quantico would have talked, and put the problem off until later. How many were there? Five? Ten? Twenty? More? However many they were, he knew that this was the elite, and that Don Mimino’s men would blindly obey any order they were given. If it had been established in New York that that rat Manzoni was living in a little town in Normandy, France, they would raze the little town in Normandy, France, to the ground and carry on from there. Much as Thomas Quintiliani hated the Mafia, he couldn’t help respecting men who pursued their aims with such determination. Don Mimino lived according to his own rules, you had to give him that.

  Once the dust cloud had evaporated, Matt rushed over to the ruins, with his Smith & Wesson in his hand. Greg was adamant about it: if there had been anything alive at the moment of the conflagration, whatever it was was now truly dead and already buried, so what was the problem? But Matt was determined to obey his grandfather’s orders to the letter, not to leave the premises until he had spat on the body of his enemy. If it hadn’t been for possible problems with customs, Don Mimino wouldn’t have said no to a little souvenir for himself, Manzoni’s heart in a jar of formaldehyde, for example. It would have been something to show to anyone who might have been considering following in his footsteps, and it might also have been a nice decorative piece for one of the shelves in his prison cell. Matt told the men to come and help clear up so as to be certain. Jerry brought the picks and spades out of the boot.

  Quintiliani, still crouching on the ground, was trying to call his men, but neither Caputo nor Di Cicco were picking up, and he drew his own conclusions. Fred remained spellbound by the spectacle of these men, some of whom he had known, and loved like brothers, now digging in the ruins of his house, searching for his body.

  “I’m going to try and get reinforcements, but for the moment we can only count on ourselves,” said Quintiliani, with astonishing sangfroid.

  Jerry, with his pickaxe in hand, was bending over the pile of stones that, ten minutes before, had been a kitchen, when he heard a ghostly wailing sound. He alerted Matt.

  “Sounds like a kid crying.”

  From the depths of the pit came a voice not strong enough to scream, but which refused to stop. Greg, who had been the cause of many types of scream during his career, had never heard such a heartbreaking sound. Guy wanted to bring it to an end before even finding out what it came from. They pulled back several pieces from walls reduced to rubble, pulled out a metal sink, picked up some kitchen equipment and hacked into the floorboards. They were just pulling back some breeze blocks, when suddenly the whole floor gave way, and they found themselves buried up to the waist. Jerry helped pull them out of this trap, but the unbearable wailing continued unabated, indeed it seemed that the creature had regained hope that someone would rescue it.

  Malavita, in her lair, had survived the explosion. A form of life that had once resembled a dog emerged from the bowels of the earth. She finally emerged into the fresh air, exhausted, her flanks pouring with blood. Her bleeding, broken body was covered in cuts. As soon as she saw the men standing still, watching her, she recognized them as her torturers and gazed at them with a pleading stare.

  Matt sneered at Sanfelice’s great confidence: “Nothing left alive” – here was something alive that had emerged from the cataclysm. And so might not Manzoni himself be in there too, that scum who had been defying them for all these years? In a fury, he attacked the dog, all that trouble for this motherfucking pooch! He grabbed an iron bar and began hitting the dog so ferociously that his men had to intervene. In the face of such barbarity, Malavita began to be sorry she had survived the earthquake.

  Quint turned away, disgusted, went over to the metal trunk, and unbolted it.

  “Help yourself, Manzoni,” he said, loading the barrel of a revolver.

  But Fred didn’t have the strength any more. Still kneeling in front of the window, he toppled to the ground and burst into tears.

  Maggie had reacted immediately, with her cry of fear, seeing her children, her flesh, her whole world collapsing. Fred had only just reached that point.

  Tom felt responsible for the tragedy, since it had been he who had consigned them to the house until further orders. He could normally find words for any occasion, but now, faced with the distress of a man who thinks his children are buried beneath the rubble of their home, he was struck dumb.

  It was true. Fred could not accept the unacceptable: he had just lost for ever the manuscript of his memoirs.

  *

  Warren waited alone on the platform for the Paris express, his pockets laden with kit. The worst was over. He was on his way, and this train wouldn’t stop until he had regained his rightful position.

  The first stage, rebuilding a new American Mafia, would begin with the creation of a Luciano-style committee, organized like the United Nations, which would be in charge of defending territories; those who failed to respect non-interference pacts would be taken in hand by independent soldiers, the Mafia equivalent of the blue helmets, who only took orders from the committee. Then he would impose on each family a system of filial law in which women would play a much more important part. The stronger the family ties, the less betrayal there would be: it is always much harder to betray a mother or a sister. Making the organization more woman-friendly would have many other virtues and would re
inforce the sense of community. The old retrograde, ossified Mediterranean model had reached the limits of its usefulness. They would, once and for all, leave the Middle Ages behind them and introduce a real sense of equality by giving women the power they so richly deserved. The next stage, probably the most delicate one, would be to steer the Mafia in a more “ecumenical” direction – that word kept coming into his head. Through the use of diplomacy, he might perhaps succeed where all other attempts at unity had failed: other races and religions would be accepted without distinction and integrated according to strictly observed quotas. The Mob had been decimated by wars against the Chinese and the Puerto Ricans – those days must now be over for ever. Apart from all these changes, the basic structure of the organization would remain the same: one boss for every three lieutenants, each of which would have ten men beneath him. The number of bosses would vary according to the region; a group of bosses would form a family, each family with its godfather, and the group of godfathers would form the top level of authority, itself presided over by the capo di tutti i capi. And that role was one Warren was perfectly happy to see himself in, in the fullness of time.

  He suddenly saw two shapes on the freight tracks a hundred yards away; they appeared from between two grain wagons, part of an interminably long train that seemed to have been abandoned there. The men, in their forties, dressed in sporty clothes, were clearly lost, and in a hurry to find their way back to where they came from. They hurried towards him. Warren noticed something familiar about their demeanour, from several small clues: heads slightly pulled into the shoulders, a sort of awkward stoop, along with great speed of movement and a powerful physical presence. When they got close enough, Warren, his heart pounding now, recognized their features as those of his fellow countrymen. One, he could swear blind, was Italian, and the other could only be a pure-bred Irishman, a fucking mick, a paddy, a harp, quite unmistakeable. Warren felt the joy of someone meeting his countrymen on foreign soil, that feeling of instinctive solidarity, that brotherly link that passes beyond frontiers. These were his homeboys. He could see himself again when he was very young, playing at the feet of these tall men in dark suits who used to pat him gently on the head. They had been his role models – there would never be any better ones. And one day he would be one of them.

  His initial enthusiasm was suddenly assailed by doubt, however. Why had these ghosts from the past suddenly appeared, just as he was making his plans for the future? Why had New Jersey come to him, and not the other way around? Warren lowered his eyes, suddenly realizing that these guys could only have got lost in Cholong-sur-Avre for one good reason, a reason that might not be good news for the Manzonis.

  Nick Bongusto and Joey Wine had come out of the school. Break was over. Matt had rung them to tell them about the fiasco at the Manzonis’ house and to order them to get back to the minibus, which was parked on the edge of the Place de la Libération. The whole business was turning out to be more complicated than they had thought. Time to set to work, and really earn those two million dollars. They climbed onto the Paris platform and finally found a person to ask – a young man standing alone, staring at the ground. Young Blake had had time now to remember the ghastly story of the snitch’s son, who had been taken hostage by the Mob to prevent his father from testifying. The father had testified, and, a few days later, what remained of the son had been found by the FBI at the bottom of a barrel of acid. Warren, seeing the two men approaching him, felt a stab in his guts, from the memory of all the threats he had heard about since childhood. It was at the root of everything, it was the basic tool, the touchstone of the whole Mafia operation – pure terror. His head felt as though it was held in a vice, his breathing stopped, his neck stiffened in pain. He felt an icy stab in his churning gut; it drained him of all strength and paralysed him; he couldn’t prevent a thin dribble of urine trickling down his leg. He, who a moment ago had seen himself as the supreme chief of organized crime, was now prepared to go down on his knees and pray for his father to appear on the platform and save him.

  “Downtown?” Joey asked.

  Terrified of betraying himself, Warren wondered if this was a trap. Was Joey really looking for the town centre, or was he just confirming his intuition? If he got it wrong, Warren could already imagine himself thrown onto the tracks and reduced to pulp by the oncoming train. He hesitated and then responded, pointing his hand in the right direction. The loudspeaker announced that the express was coming into the station. A few people got out. The ghosts had disappeared.

  He was now marked for ever by the fear of death. Nothing would ever be the same. Now he was confronted with the first real choice of his new life as an adult: should he go off and conquer the New World, or should he stay with his family now, at this, the moment of truth? The train drew out of Cholong, leaving Warren standing on the platform.

  *

  Back on the Place de la Libération, right in the middle of the festive crowd, Belle was allowing herself a few last moments of wandering around. She envied all these families exercising their right to happiness. If only she had had the good luck to be born into an underprivileged family, to a life of suffering, or to mad people, living outside reason, or even retarded ones, with no clear thoughts about the world around them. Instead, Fate had decreed something different for her, and she had been dealt a father who was capable of sticking a man’s fingers in a door and then slamming that door. This same father, who had been so gifted at that type of activity, had risen through the ranks to control a whole territory, like a mayor or a deputy – but feared a great deal more than either of those, since he had the power of life or death over anyone who crossed his path. And to cap it all, he had decided to denounce this parallel world to the authorities, condemning himself and his family to live like hunted creatures. Belle had been both exiled and banished, and there was no place left for her on this earth.

  She laughed happily at the surrounding gaiety, and then headed towards the big wheel. Its thirty-six baskets, filled with people, would soon empty out to make way for the next lot of passengers. Without worrying about the practical technicalities of her plan (How would she get under the safety bar? What would be the right moment to climb onto the edge and jump from the highest point? Where would she hit the ground?), she was filled with a strange sense of elation. She would only get one shot at it, but her suicide would be as great a success as everything else she did. She would take her revenge on a cruel and cynical world with this supremely romantic gesture. She approached the turnstile, bought her ticket and waited for the wheel to stop.

  *

  Matt and his troop, furious at not having found Giovanni’s body, joined up with the four other members of the gang in the Place de la Libération. The time had come for a council of war. Jerry thought they should use what was known as the Brazilian method of spreading terror in a city centre with a trapped population: this consisted in opening fire on a public building, preferably a police station or town hall, and, as they had done with the fishing hut, firing on it until the whole building caved in on itself. Greg even suggested that they should save time by simply firing a second rocket from the AT-4 Viper. Franck and Hector said they’d rather avoid going that far: perhaps they could proceed mano a mano, and send a general appeal to people’s goodwill rather than spreading panic. This fucking funfair could be turned to good use. They had spotted the deputy, the mayor, the chief of police and his six men, all in uniform: all they needed to do was neutralize them and then make use of them. As far as the rest of the population was concerned, Franck suggested sticking to the usual recipe for obtaining information: two thirds intimidation, one third bribery.

  During this phase of the operation, the men were able to really express themselves, and make full use of their skills. In Le Daufin restaurant, which opened onto the square, the mayor of Cholong, the deputy for the Eure and the police chief were forced to interrupt their aperitif by the sight of five revolvers pointing at them. They thought at f
irst that this was some sort of practical joke, but then Matt showed them, through the window, what had become of the forces of law and order: six uneasy-looking gendarmes had already accepted the status of hostage, under the threat of an MP5 9mm submachine gun. To the question “Where shall we put them?” Jerry had a jokey answer that Matt, to his surprise, thought was brilliant. And so the inhabitants of Cholong, unable to react in any way to such a strange situation, were treated to the sight of a curious procession filing through the funfair: the grandees and the gendarmes, surrounded manu militari by a handful of untidy tourists. How could one imagine that these shabby tourists were capable of emptying tower blocks with baseball bats, and of taking possession of entire districts as if they were a battalion of GIs, or of controlling, for security purposes, all the comings and goings around several buildings during a summit meeting? Matt instructed them to place the muzzle of a .38 Special against the head of the big-wheel operator, just to ensure his cooperation. The previous passengers disembarked, still reeling from their ride. Hector and Jerry, doubled up laughing, pushed each hostage into a basket.

  Belle, her ticket in her hand, found herself ejected from the platform, along with all the others waiting their turn. Like her brother before her, she immediately recognized this form of violence. And like her brother before her, she suddenly felt surrounded by ghosts. These were the guys who used to treat her like a princess, escorting her wherever she wanted to go. If she’d asked them for the moon when she was ten, they would have thrown in the sun as well. And now these same guys were sabotaging her suicide bid? Was her life just going to be a never-ending hell, with God on their side, determined to do her in?