Malavita

by Tonino Benacquista

  “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?

  “Get out. We never saw you.”

  “? . . .”

  “Get out before we change our minds, asshole.”

  I told him in great detail what we’d do to him if we ever heard of him again, or if he ever reappeared in his old haunts. On the way home, Nick and I, we didn’t say anything. We would be bound together by this secret until the day we died.

  And now that day had come for one of us in this street in So Long, so many years later. We both knew that one of us was going to cop it. It did us good to reminisce about that story, a story that only ourselves and the reprieved victim would ever know about. We wondered what on earth could have become of that guy, and we started laughing, and that was when I saw a split-second gap, the split-second we had both been waiting for, just enough for me to draw my gun and blow Nick’s head off.

  As I looked at his body lying on the pavement, I wondered to myself about questions of friendship. Is the concept of friendship amongst made men different from that of other people? If it has to end one day, surely any true friendship can and must only end in bloodshed.

  All this time, Tom was taking cover on the top floor of a building. I say “taking cover,” he wasn’t actually taking cover, he was living out an old fantasy, and watching the world through a gun sight.

  If anyone had asked him, when he was a child, what he wanted to do when he grew up, he would have replied “sniper” without any hesitation.

  Sniping, for him, was a quite different thing from dirty and squalid murder. Crime that invol
ved smells and noises was fine for animals like us, he thought. He, Tom Quintiliani, was way above all that sort of thing, in this case quite literally: he had found the highest point in the centre of town (apart from the tower above the church, which, he later confessed to me, he had tried unsuccessfully to break into – no respect . . . ) On his terrace, he just had to pivot around to catch all the different parts of So Long in his sights. They all looked so close through the scope, almost within a hand’s reach. Surveillance screens never showed anything as clearly as this.

  Sniping had a metaphysical dimension for him too. It represented silence, time, distance, concentration, understanding, seeing. The sniper was the personification of death, striking at the most unexpected moment, from far away, invisibly. Like God Himself. He felt as though he was everywhere at once. He was right about one thing: you get your reward if you wait long enough. And beyond your wildest dreams.

  Julio Guzman and Paul Gizzi had paused on their patrol to drink some water from the fountain under the covered market at the north end of the square.

  At the other end, a mile and a half to the south, Franck Rosello sat on a bench in the square opposite the Town Hall and unfolded a map of the town. For an occasional sniper like Tom, it was an honour to have this living legend amongst sharpshooters in his sights.

  But the closest of all his targets was Greg Sanfelice, sitting in one of the baskets of the big wheel, watching over his hostages like a mother hen.

  Tom was wondering which one to choose. A real sniper would never have asked himself that question.

  After he had drunk at the fountain, Paul Gizzi moved aside to let Julio Guzman take his place: he was already lying on the ground, where he had dropped down like a dead leaf. Tom had aimed at his heart.

  A second later, Franck Rosello slumped down on his bench, without having looked death in the face, just like the victims of his own shootings. Every time he had pressed the trigger, he had thought that he too would like to die like that. To be hit without warning, without time for fear or regrets. Tom had just made his wish come true.

  Franck’s arm had no sooner touched the grass than Greg’s head exploded into the air. Close shot on a moving target. Tom was earning a place in the pantheon of elite marksmen.

  After a moment of pride, he suffered a sudden churning fear in his gut, a terror he found it hard to describe to me later (his hands were trembling so much, the only way to stop them was to sit on them – I’m not joking). It wasn’t his first dead body, no it wasn’t that. But to have shot three men almost at the same time in three different places; that was “supernatural” – that was the word he used. That idiot wanted metaphysics – well, he got them. Still, when he came down from his perch, he swore he’d never touch a long-distance rifle again.

  We met up at the rendezvous. He suggested getting rid of Paul Gizzi, who was now alone in the market square. We would work a simple manoeuvre: one would be the bait, the other would grab the guy; it didn’t take long (apart from deciding who would be the tethered goat, Quint being uncooperative again . . . ) I had never met Paul Gizzi until then. When I shot the bullet into his brain, I was sorry not to have had time to get to know him, and to compliment him on the famous “Gizzi move.”

  It was a good ten years ago, at the end of a winter afternoon. Gizzi had plunged the whole business section of San Francisco into darkness, with a four-hour blackout. There had been a general panic, leaving him four hours to operate in. The result was he cleaned out three banks of sixty per cent of their liquid cash. All the members of the gang had agreed not to share out the proceeds for a year. Not a single one ever boasted about the job, and not a single one was ever caught. That’s the secret: keeping your mouth shut. I would love to have asked him a thousand questions about the logistics of the operation, and make him cough up his secrets.

  That’s my greatest fault: I prefer the backstage details to the show itself. I hate not knowing about the tricks and the strings. Once, one evening in Las Vegas, I was with some other Mob guys watching the greatest magic show on earth. The man on the stage kept appearing and disappearing, flying through the air, and everybody was amazed by the magician’s genius. I was dying of curiosity like the others, but, unlike them, I couldn’t leave it at that. I couldn’t resist it. As the next show began, I slipped backstage and managed to silence all the bodyguards who were trying to do what bodyguards do. I went into the magician’s dressing room to make him explain how he became invisible in front of a hundred people. The guy thought I was joking at first, and then he invoked the magician’s code of honour, according to which you never reveal your methods. It was only when I suggested some disappearing tricks of my own – how to make a magician’s body vanish in the Nevada desert, how to make all his teeth drop out at once, how to lock him in a trunk with a rattlesnake – that the greatest magician in the world finally spilled the beans.

  And here I was that day, two paces from the drinking fountain in the market square at So Long, and I hadn’t had time to say to Paul: “I really admire what you do!” – to tell him how much his work had always been a point of reference for all of us. But time was short and we had to get on with getting rid of these guys without having to mull over the good old days each time. So now no one would ever know how Paul had pulled off his “Gizzi move,” his very own secret weapon. His secret would go with him to the grave.

  In crime, just like any other part of life, it’s the champions who get the respect. People love great exploits, it’s the thing people go on dreaming of right up to the end. What does discipline matter in the face of genius? Each of these gangsters who wanted to kill me deserved whole volumes telling their life stories and analysing their methods. They pushed themselves that bit further, breaking new barriers of excellence. Look at me, for example – I always carry a photo of John Dillinger in my wallet. He was the only really great figure of the Thirties. Even Baby Face Nelson and the boys from the Barrow gang, much as I respect them, couldn’t reach his knee. That was the time of artists and poets, the true idealists. Dillinger respected human life and didn’t like leaving innocent victims. At that time, wolf only killed wolf, the sheep didn’t come into it, except when it came to being fleeced.

  The thing is, to tell the truth, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s amateurism. Crime should be left to criminals. Professional killers are the only ones I respect. The others, the occasional assassins, the retarded delinquents, the avengers of lost causes, the crazy serial killers, the fanatical terrorists, the loudmouth murderers, the small-time gangsters – all those who haven’t been trained in the skills of death, they only deserve my undying contempt. Let the shooters shoot, for God’s sake, and stick to your own quiet little life, you’ll see, you’ll gain from it in the end. Stop annoying those around you, it’s not your job, and if you should happen to try playing the gang boss, you’ll pay with your life. Crime, real crime, is a vocation. You pay a high price if you devote your life to it, and it’s a price few men are prepared to pay.

  Tom Quint, who’s a predator too, but on the right side of the law, says the same: let us work in peace, all you other young idiots tempted by this career. Let the big boys play in their playground, and go home. Your families will mourn for you and you will suffer when human justice turns against you. And divine justice won’t be any kinder towards you – it hates amateurs.

  He and I had decided to walk back up towards the Place de la Libération in order to hit the head of the squad, Matt Gallone, and cause a bit of havoc in the rest of the gang. No luck – no sooner had we had the idea than we got ourselves nabbed, me and Tom, like amateurs. No way of escaping, no bargaining, nothing. When you hear the crackle of machine-gun fire and a guy tells you to kneel down, well, you kneel down, especially when you have no idea where he’s coming from, or who he is, a cop or a killer. You just kneel down and put your hands on your head, without even being asked. We looked pretty clever, both of us side by side on the sidewalk, about
to be killed without even knowing who was going to do it (I thought I heard Jerry Wine’s voice, but I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask). There wasn’t time for anything, no wisecracks, no last wish, no prayer, no last insult for the killer, or thought for a loved one, nothing. Tom and me threw our arms down and waited for a quick clean death.

  What happened next? There was a burst of gunfire – but it wasn’t for us. Amazed at still being alive, we heard screams, and turned around to see Jerry Wine and Guy Barber, their legs riddled with bullets, rolling around in agony on the ground. The person who had shot them was a little guy, about fourteen. I didn’t recognize him immediately.

  Like all kids, he had grown up without me noticing it. When he was just so high and could hardly talk, he used to gaze at me with such adoration – at me, his rascal of a father. It was a different kind of admiration to what I was used to; that had been the admiration I got from killers and courtiers, based on other things, fear mainly, but also envy and jealousy – everybody had plenty of reason to admire me and fear me. All except this little fellow who hung on to my leg and clung on as though I was a giant. That sort of admiration came from pure love. I can still remember Warren’s inventiveness when he wanted to make me happy: during games of Monopoly he would slip money to me under the table when I got into debt. His elder sister couldn’t understand why he did that. “It’s only a game,” she’d say. But the kid insisted. His dad had to win, and that was that. And the more I was myself, with all the faults his mother would point out, the more he loved me for being myself. For him I was the perfect father, and everything about me was exceptional. And then suddenly, one day, that trusting look in his eyes just disappeared. I never understood why.

  I asked him where he’d got the machine gun from. He said: “It was by Julio Guzman’s body, by the drinking fountain.” I saw Quint preparing to finish off Jerry Wine and Guy Barber, so I took the kid by the shoulder to spare him the sight of a summary execution. As soon as we got round the corner, we fell into each other’s arms.