Places came and went. This was not their normal role, which was to stay put and display their innumerable layers of history, culture and tradition. Visitors were supposed to approach with due reverence, a full wallet, and at least a feigned knowledge of the wonders in store. They certainly weren’t supposed to flit in and out in such a free and easy fashion. It was something new for cities such as these to be treated as mere stops on an extemporized itinerary, but Zen sensed that once they got over the shock they quite liked being flirted with in this casual way.
And what pretty names they had! Perugia, Arezzo, Siena, Empoli, Pisa, Parma … Which was just as well, since all Zen usually saw of them was the name, blazoned white on an enamelled blue platform sign, that and the generic surrounding suburbs tracing history in reverse like geological layers in a core sample: sixties apartment buildings, spartan Fascist blocks, turn-of-the-century industrial barracks, and the pomposities of post-unification triumphalism.
If there was a little time to kill before the next train left, he might permit himself to wander out into the streets surrounding the station in search of a sandwich or a coffee. At which point the city — particularly if it was one of the more celebrated names — often seemed to give a little quiver of shock. ‘You mean you aren’t going to visit the museums, the cathedral and the remains of the mediaeval ramparts?’ it demanded of him as he breezed through the sleazy, strident fringes of the station zone, his only concern to leave again as soon as possible. ‘Perhaps next time,’ he silently replied. ‘But not now. I have to go. I have to keep going.’
He knew that he was in a fugue state, of course, but this knowledge made no difference. He was like an addict who is intelligently aware of his addiction and its possible consequences, but powerless to break it. Whenever he tried to do so, it effortlessly reasserted its control by flashing his own memories at him, slices from his central cortex which sent him scurrying for the next train, any other destination than this intolerable terminus. His desiccated mother gabbling at him in a foreign language. Her coffin, almost as tiny as a child’s, vanishing into the bowels of the crematorium. The ceremony at the cemetery, with him, Maria Grazia and the Nieddu family the only mourners. And then, if all else failed, him at home that evening, watching the television news and seeing the crumpled, charred wreck of the car in which yet another Anti-Mafia magistrate had gone to her death, gunned down on a road just outside Taormina. A certain Carla Arduini, a friend of the victim, had also been killed.
Piacenza, Pavia, Novara, Lugano, Bolzano, Trento, Padova, Treviso, Trieste … On the other side of the window, the landscape was laid out in varying hues and textures like the pelt of some precious, extinct animal. The thriller he was reading had turned out to be dead too. Something must have gone wrong at the printers, because the last thirty pages were missing. Well, not missing exactly. The pages were there, but they were from another book in the same series, but with a quite different cast and plot. The result was a double sense of frustration: not only would he never know the truth about what had happened in the original story, but he found himself trying to reconstruct the various intrigues and incidents which had led up to the interpolated ending.
At Cremona, and again at Mantova, he tried to buy another copy of the book, only to be told that it was out of print. The local trains seemed to have inherited the malarial symptoms once endemic to the inhabitants of the Po delta, running infrequently and at about the speed of the river itself in the various channels over which the track passed and repassed. By the time Zen finally regained the main line at Fidenza, it was eight in the evening and a spectacular thunderstorm was in progress. He stepped down from the railcar on to a surface which felt for a moment disturbingly familiar: crunchy, mobile, granular. But this was hail, not sand.
He was about to walk over and check the departure timetable when an alarm bell started ringing on the wall of the station building, announcing the arrival of a train from the north. Simultaneously, the diesel unit in which he had arrived gave a sullen roar and shuffled off into the gathering dusk. Too late, Zen remembered that he had left his unfinished thriller lying open on the seat opposite the one in which he had been sitting. He couldn’t even remember the title, never mind the author. Now he would never know how it ended.
In the barrage of hail, which was gradually turning to heavy rain, a bright light appeared away in the distance down the main line. Its announcement confirmed by this visual proof, the electric bell cut out, but it was another minute or two before the light perceptibly widened and intensified as the electric locomotive and its long line of carriages came into view through the torrential downpour. It was only then that Zen realized that he had also left his only pack of cigarettes on the railcar.
Luckily there was a bar a little further down the platform, with the square white-on-black T sign indicating that it sold tobacco. As the train squealed to a halt in front of him, Zen groped in his pocket and found a ten-thousand-lire note. That would buy him a couple of packs of Nazionali. It would mean missing this train, but first things first. There would soon be another, going somewhere else, and one destination was as good as another.
The carriage which had drawn up in front of Zen was not immediately recognizable as such. The classically chaste blue and white sleeping-car design had been almost obliterated by fat spray-paint graffiti — statements on steroids — which covered even the windows, shutting out any view of the outside world for the occupants. On the door appeared a signature, a date, and the slogan ‘Proud to be Crazy’. Zen realized that he hadn’t seen any graffiti in Sicily. Perhaps the islanders were behind the times in this, as in so much else. Or maybe the Mafia had hauled all the spray-paint egomaniacs behind the carriage sheds and shot them.
The door opened and a man in uniform emerged. He snatched the banknote that Zen was holding in his hand, picked up his luggage and bustled back aboard the train, safe from the gusts of driven rain blasting down the platform. Beside the door into which he had disappeared was a white destination sign slotted into metal grooves. It read: MILANO C. — BOLOGNA — FIRENZE C. DI MARTE — ROMA TIB. — NAPOLI — VILLA S. GIOV. — MESSINA — CATANIA. Further down the platform, the station master was striding self-importantly about, a lighted green wand raised above his head. The sleeping-car attendant reappeared in the doorway.
‘Quickly!’ he called. ‘It’s your last chance.’
Already the massive train had begun to move again, imperceptibly at first, but with a momentum which would carry it overnight down the spine of Italy and across the Straits of Messina to Sicily. Zen took a few steps to his right to get up to speed, then grasped the gleaming handle and, just in time, swung himself aboard.
The truck was parked on a bend on one of the roads into Corleone leading up from the valley of the Frattina river, a glaucous trickle at this time of year. It was a large vehicle with a freezer unit and a Catania number-plate. On both sides of the lorry, colourful painted designs advertised a meat-processing firm located in Catania whose products, according to the slogan below the image of a satisfied housewife, could be relied upon to be ‘Always Fresh, Always Wholesome’.
The driver climbed down from the cab and languorously stretched his muscles. He was about thirty, wirily built, with a military-style haircut and heavy black stubble on his chin and cheeks. The time was a few minutes after three in the morning, the dead heart of the night, here in the dead heart of the island, almost exactly half-way between the northern and southern coasts. Apart from the patterned punctures of the stars and the pervasive glow of the moon, presently screened by a thin wafer of cloud, there wasn’t a light to be seen, nor any sound to be heard.
Beside the narrow road, bolstered on the other side by a dry-stone retaining wall, stood a roofless, dilapidated two-storey structure which might have been a small farmhouse but was in fact an abandoned cantoniera: a dwelling and workshop for the man responsible in former years for the upkeep of this stretch of highway. The driver of the truck lit
a cigarette and gazed up at the night sky, picking out the constellations whose supposed significance, indeed even their physical coherence, had turned out to be merely illusory.
After some time a faint flaw made itself felt in the crystalline silence. Far off in the distance, a light appeared and disappeared, turning this way and that. The driver tossed aside his cigarette, walked around to the back of the truck and opened the heavy metal doors. Reaching inside, he extracted a paper-wrapped package. Reacting to the change of temperature, the truck’s cooling system turned itself on, but its gentle hum was drowned out by the other noise, much closer now. The light, which had vanished, suddenly reappeared, a cold glare slicing through the darkness like a butcher’s knife. A moment later the motorbike screeched to a halt beside the truck, whose driver mounted the pillion, clasping the bulky package. The bike roared away up the road.
Less than a minute later, it was in the close alleys and twisting streets of Corleone. Here, the clamour of the engine rebounded deafeningly from the walls. The motorcycle worked its way through the entrails of the sleeping town, slowing just enough for the passenger to toss his package against the door of one of the houses, then racketing off along Statale 118, the main road leading west through the barren hills towards Prizzi. Some young hooligans out on a spree, those townsfolk who had been dredged from their slumbers concluded. They wouldn’t have tried it in the old days, but now Totò was gone there was no more respect.
It wasn’t for another three hours that this perception began to change. There was the ‘ham’, for a start. That’s how Annunziata described it to the priest, who was preparing to celebrate early mass.
‘Lying right there on the doorstep,’ she went on.
‘But where, figlia mia?’ the priest responded in an irritated tone. He’d had a sleepless night, administering extreme unction to a dying woman at the top of the town and trying to console her relatives. Another hysterical woman was the last thing he needed now.
‘On the doorstep,’ Annunziata repeated stubbornly.
‘Which doorstep?’
The woman’s silence was sufficient answer.
‘Di loro?’ asked the priest.
Being a priest, he was licensed to ask awkward questions, but in this case even he did so by implication. Was it their doorstep? Annunziata gave a minimal but decisive nod.
‘A ham?’ was the next question.
‘I don’t know. It had butcher’s wrapping on. And there was a dog there, the puppy that Leoluca tried to drown in the drain but it crawled back out? It was sniffing at it.’
Meanwhile, the ham had attracted the attention of other dogs. In fact they all seemed to be there, every loose hound in the town, snuffling around the wrapped package as though it were a bitch in heat. The consequent growling and nipping attracted the attention of various passers-by, one of whom alerted the occupants of the house.
By this time the truck was no longer parked on the curve opposite the abandoned cantoniera, thanks to a local lad whose private enterprise later earned him a slow strangulation and interment in the shaft of a disused sulphur mine. Ignazio had noticed the truck on his way back from another venture, which involved the sale of thirty-four illegal immigrants from North Africa to the representative of an agribusiness south of Naples which needed cheap indentured labour.
The deal had been struck after an inspection of the merchandise in Mazara del Vallo, a fishing port on the south-west corner of the island. This was deep in the territory of the Marsala clans, and strictly off-limits to entrepreneurs from anywhere else, especially Corleone, so Ignazio had arranged the appointment — at a disused fish-packing plant just south of the town — for the early hours of the morning, arriving under cover of darkness and leaving as soon as the duffle-bag of cash had changed hands.
Travel on a north-south axis in this part of Sicily was relatively easy, but going from west to east you might as well be on a mule as in a car. There were various possible routes, none of them good. Ignazio wanted to get out of enemy territory as quickly as possible, so he opted to take the autostrada to the Gallitello turn-off, then cut across country on back roads. It was almost six o’clock before he sighted his destination, distinct in the pre-dawn glimmer on its hilltop. A few minutes later he saw the truck.
Ignazio was by nature an opportunist, and although he had already done very nicely on the night’s work — even after the cut he’d have to give the importer and the handling people — he was not about to turn down an opportunity such as this. A meat truck from Catania abandoned at the roadside! He was back on his home turf now, and no one here had any exaggerated respect for the Limina family. Any windfalls from their territory were fair game. The driver would have known that, of course, which was no doubt why he’d vanished after his rig broke down on that excruciatingly steep ascent into Corleone. Odd route to choose, but he’d probably got lost.
Ignazio braked hard and turned off into an abandoned mule track leading down to the left. He bounced around a curve, parked out of sight of the road and then ran back to the truck. All he needed to do was break into the cab, then fix whatever had gone wrong. If he couldn’t, he’d use his cellphone to page his brother. Worst came to worst, they could cut Concetto in on the deal in return for the use of his tow truck.
None of these refinements proved necessary. The cab door was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition, the engine started first time. In retrospect, this should perhaps have given Ignazio pause, but he was an opportunist, and opportunity was clearly knocking.
The road was too narrow to turn the truck around, so Ignazio was forced to blast through the centre of town before heading up into the mountains to the east, looking for somewhere to stash the thing for a few hours, long enough for him to get back to his car, contact his brother and work out what to do next. And he quickly found it, in the form of a dried-up river-bed alongside the old road just north of Monte Cardella, the direct route to Prizzi since by-passed by the longer but less arduous strada statale. From there it was about six kilometres back to the spot where he’d left the car, but all downhill. Ignazio locked the truck, pocketed the keys and set off.
It took him about forty minutes to reach the place where he’d left his car, by-passing the town on another of the old mule tracks which criss-crossed the area. Five minutes after that he was back in Corleone, but by then the drama had moved on to a third act, and his role had been revealed to be merely supernumerary. By the time he and his brother returned to the parked truck, others were there to meet them.
The ensuing explanations took over three hours. Long before that, Ignazio started screaming, ‘Kill me! I’ve told you all I know, so just kill me!’ Which of course they did, but later. The refrigerated lorry had proved to contain the bodies of five ‘made men’ of the town, including the grandson of Bernardo Provenzano, the capo of the family, now in hiding in Palermo. The Corleonesi had accepted an invitation from a clan in Messina to attend a lunch to celebrate and inspire future contacts between the two clans involved. At some point, the five had been placed, alive, into the back of the truck, which was then driven off with the freezing unit turned on. Thanks to the sub-zero temperatures, none of the corpses showed any sign of post-mortem deliquescence, but they were almost unrecognizable just the same. Ironically enough, the only undamaged one was that of Binù’s grandson, the reason being that his left leg had been removed before he had entered the ‘death chamber’, and so he had been in no condition to try to escape. It was the thigh portion of this leg, suitably wrapped, which had been flung on to their doorstep. Examination of the severed stump suggested that the amputation had been performed with a chainsaw.
The bar in Piazza Carlo Alberto was as packed as ever, but the crowd was more evenly distributed now that the exclusion zone created by Carla Arduini’s presence was no longer in effect. There was perhaps a momentary flicker of the former tension when Aurelio Zen made his appearance, but it was instantly dissipated in a renewed rumble of disc
ussion and comment.
Zen made his way to the counter and ordered a coffee. The barman appeared oddly frenetic and distracted. He said not a word, going about his business in a jerky, mute, compulsive frenzy, like an actor in a silent film.
‘Where’s the young lady who used to meet me here?’ Zen enquired as the coffee touched down on his saucer.
The barman ran through a range of facial expressions as if trying on a selection of hats, none of which really suited.
‘How should I know?’ he said at length, furiously wiping the gleaming counter with a rag. ‘She didn’t come today. I don’t know why. She just didn’t come. Maybe tomorrow …’
Zen knocked his coffee back.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She won’t be coming tomorrow, either. She won’t be coming ever again.’
He smiled mirthlessly.
‘Neither will I, for that matter.’
His eyes never leaving those of the barman, he produced his wallet and extracted a two-thousand-lire note which he tossed on the counter. With it came a spray of what looked like dust. Noticing it, Zen turned his wallet upside down. A stream of reddish grains poured out, forming an uneven pile on the stainless-steel counter.
‘What’s that?’ the barman demanded.
‘It’s called “blood rain”,’ Zen told him. ‘Think of it as a message.’
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