The Second Day of the Renaissance

by Timothy Williams

  “Gracchi became a television journalist just for the sake of Craxi and the Socialists?”

  Spadano shook his head slowly, “Gracchi was an honest man. Honest and middle-class—and though you refused to see it, essentially decent. He hated the Mafia—the Trapani Mafia in particular. Gracchi’s real weakness was loving the limelight. He joined TRTP because he fell in love with the studio lights—ineluctably attracted towards them like an insect.” The general paused. “There were times when Gracchi would stick his tongue out at the viewers. ‘No hairs on my tongue,’ he’d say to the camera. Gracchi talked plainly, and he wanted the viewers to trust him.”

  “They did?”

  “A Northerner unafraid to speak the truth about things that everybody knew but nobody dared mention? Can you imagine? Telling everybody the emperor had no clothes. It was wonderfully inebriating—and totally reckless. Gracchi even had priests warning him off, advising him to be careful. Gracchi continued to stick out his tongue, figuratively and literally, and he did some good work—for over a year. Corruption in the hospital, the eternal problem of no running water, lethargy in the town hall. Something quite unheard of in that conservative, prissy backwater of provincialism, where the Mafia’s just as prissy and conservative. Gracchi brought his innocence and his righteous anger to Trapani. He also brought his experience as a journalist from Lotta Continua. Over the months he worked there, Gracchi trained a group of ex-addicts from BRAMAN and turned them into competent newsmen and TV journalists.”

  Spadano gave a thin smile.

  “A year—and lucky to survive for as long as he did, the stupid Northern bastard.”

  13: Saracens

  On a clear day, you can see Africa and the foreign coast from where, many generations ago—before the Normans, long before the Spaniards—the Saracen invaders came, sailing beneath the hot Scirocco.

  1988 and Sicily has changed little over the centuries, despite the intervening foreign invasions.

  September the twenty-sixth.

  It is the end of the long summer, that windless, airless Sicilian summer of unrelenting heat. With the advent of autumn, the clocks must go back and darkness falls an hour earlier upon Trapani and the surrounding countryside.

  6:58 p.m.

  A white Fiat drives away from the city of Trapani and heads towards the hills, guided by high beams that slice a wedge through the dusty olive groves. Behind the car, a cloud of dust billows and then gently settles to the ground. It is dusk and the shadows grow in intensity. Erice, nestling in the mountain, is lost to the blue-black haze of gathering night.

  The car slows as it comes to a crossroads. It turns left, goes over a bridge and carefully picks up speed.

  A Duna, driven by Signor Gracchi, founding member of Lotta Continua, one-time revolutionary, social worker and now crusading television journalist.

  From the studios of TRTP in Trapani, it is just fifteen kilometers to BRAMAN. Gracchi drives fast this Sunday evening, eager to get home, leaning forward in his seat, urging the Fiat forward, his weight upon the steering wheel.

  Sitting beside him is a young woman. She is pretty, has auburn hair and her name is Luciana. Luciana is eighteen years old and is from Milan. She used to be an addict; that was before she came to BRAMAN, before she came to Sicily, before she left Milan. Now, under the careful tutelage of Gracchi’s team at BRAMAN, Luciana is learning how to become a television journalist. How to earn a decent living, how to become a productive citizen. Learning how to make the most of a new life that opens like an unread book before her.

  Luciana smokes a cigarette as she leans against the car door. With her small feet on the dashboard, she looks admiringly at the charismatic leader of BRAMAN. Gracchi fascinates the young woman.

  Gracchi has always been a fascinating man. Thoroughly modern, the bittersweet product of Postwar Italy, with all the conflicting contradictions, weaknesses and strengths of our nation. A flawed hero, an Italian hero, a poet, a crusader, at times even a buffoon. Gracchi is human, he has his frailties and has no doubt committed many mistakes during his forty-two years. Yet here in Sicily, people choose not see the flaws. They overlook his past because no one here can question his dedication to the present: the cause that he has fought for. The cause of human dignity, justice and democracy. No one can doubt his commitment. No one can deny his courage in the unequal fight against the Trapanese Mafia.

  A fight lost long in advance, only Gracchi does not realize it.

  The Duna runs swiftly past the San Michele church standing at the crossroads.

  Gracchi steps on the brake. “What’s Lakshmi doing there?” In the failing light, Gracchi has dimly discerned the form of a girl sitting on the steps of the church.

  “That’s not her,” Luciana replies, taking the cigarette from her mouth. “A girl from the village—your daughter has long hair.” Luciana laughs. “Long black hair.”

  Lakshmi is her father’s greatest joy. Gracchi, too, laughs cheerfully, glad the day is over, glad to be returning to his wife and his daughter. To his friends—to the one safe haven in this hostile island.

  The Duna resumes its speed.

  Here in the hills, the Mafia seems a world away, thank God.

  Seems.

  The car approaches the entrance to BRAMAN, gets onto the dirt track, a straight line between the fields. The overhead lights have not been switched on although the clocks came forward this morning.

  Away from the scattered houses of the village, the countryside is dark and the road is like a dirty ribbon stretching before the headbeams. The Duna reaches the first zigzag of the hillside, turns left and the window implodes. Gracchi is hit by a projectile and on the rising incline, the car loses its momentum. A jolt as the Duna stalls at the edge of the track.

  There are two further explosions.

  Signor Gracchi, founder member of Lotta Continua and now anti-Mafia journalist, mumbles something. He slumps sideways and Luciana cannot hear him. She is huddled beneath the seat; all she can see is the blood running from the driver’s chest.

  The car stops.

  Luciana scrambles from the car, bent double. In the darkness, like a stalked and terrified animal, the young woman stumbles forward, caught in the headbeams and blindly running the hundred meters to the entrance of BRAMAN.

  Signor Gracchi is wounded, and she must get help. Signor Gracchi has been hit. Signor Gracchi has been killed.

  By the time the police reach the car, just twenty minutes later, Gracchi has already breathed his last breath, three weeks after his forty-second birthday.

  14: Third Level

  The sun had disappeared and the glow had vanished from the cathedral. The low sky was now uniformly dull above the roofs of Siena.

  “Very sorry indeed.” Trotti tossed the article back onto the desk. “All my condolences to the lovely widow Gracchi, if you should meet her. And of course, to the not-so-lovely Lia Guerra.” He stood up. “Must be on my way.”

  “Hear me out, Piero.”

  “Some ex-terrorist gets killed in Sicily?” There was irritation in Trotti’s voice. “I’m not interested in Gracchi, Spadano. Nothing to do with me.”

  Spadano asked, “Another coffee?”

  Trotti allowed his weight to fall back onto the seat. “Wouldn’t be trying to kill me, would you?”

  “There are worse ways to go.”

  “Being bored to death.” A smile broke through Trotti’s dour features, “Some proper sugar this time.”

  Spadano ordered coffee over the intercom before continuing. “In Trapani Gracchi’s death came as a shock.”

  “Gracchi knew what he was letting himself in for.”

  “People were expecting the killer to be identified. Unfortunately, the Carabinieri made a mess of the enquiry.”

  Trotti raised an amused eyebrow. “Now you surprise me.”

  “Carabinieri and
the Polizia, for that matter. It was all the fault of the investigating judge. Or rather, the judges. Too many magistrates and too many culprits.”

  “A classic Mafia killing.”

  “Too anonymous.” Spadano shook his head doubtfully. “When the Mafia kill, they want everybody to know—and to know why.”

  “Gracchi hadn’t made enough enemies in Sicily?”

  “Gracchi’d spent his life making enemies—just like you, Trotti.”

  “Me?”

  “Not only the Trapani Mafia. There were enemies in the commune. The killers could’ve just as well been outsiders as they could’ve been people working on the inside at BRAMAN. An inmate wanting to get revenge.”

  “One of the addicts?”

  “They’re no angels.” Spadano said, “Several had connections with organized crime. BRAMAN wasn’t the sort of place for people with a cast-iron virginity.”

  “Why kill Gracchi?”

  “Gracchi could be very cavalier.” Spadano raised the shoulders of the linen suit, “For all his revolutionary views, he wasn’t particularly democratic or egalitarian in his dealings with people.”

  “Cherchez la femme.”

  Spadano gave a surprised smile.

  “What about his wife?” Trotti asked.

  “They no longer slept in the same bed, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know all about the sleeping arrangements. A dark horse, Spadano.”

  “Later, suspicion fell on Giovanni Verga. Things’d been deteriorating between him and Gracchi. Despite the carefully cultivated appearances.”

  “I thought Verga found Gracchi useful.”

  “Differences over the aims of the commune—and the finances. Gracchi was unhappy about the Socialist dimension, about the money coming from the friends of Craxi—political friends. The third level.”

  Spadano was now leaning against the desk, opposite Trotti. His arms were folded. He held the unlit cigar to his lips, “In Sicily, a lot of Mafia killings have nothing to do with the Mafia.”

  There was a knock at the door. The patrician officer entered, carrying a tray: a cup of coffee and a silver bowl of sugar. Bending slightly, he served Trotti, pouring three spoonfuls of sugar into the small cup.

  “The name Beltoni mean anything to you, Piero?” Spadano asked.

  “Should it?” Trotti stirred his coffee and laughed. Trotti was in a hurry to leave, to get back to the girl, to get to Rome. He had spent his life in smoke-filled offices, feeling tired and fortifying himself with strong coffee and more sugar than was good for him.

  The officer nodded towards the general and silently withdrew.

  “BRAMAN had been penetrated by people in the pay of the Mafia. That much’s certain. The investigating judges believed Enzo Beltoni—an employee at BRAMAN—had been expressly recruited by the Trapanese clan to eliminate Gracchi.”

  Trotti drank the sweet coffee in a single gulp. His eyes ached; he needed to sleep.

  “Beltoni managed to escape before the judge could ask him too many awkward questions. Escaped to Beirut and then to America.”

  “This has got something to do with me, Spadano?”

  “Beltoni’s been out of the country now for the last seven years.”

  “So what?”

  After a long pause, Spadano asked, “Sure the name Beltoni doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  Trotti shook his head.

  “You knew his brother well enough, Piero.” Spadano added brightly, “You killed him.”

  15: Beltoni

  Boatti and Commissario Merenda were standing together beneath the same black umbrella.

  Finally the rain had started to fall, thick drops that fell on to the dusty earth and into the slowly moving waters of the river.

  An ugly place, the edge of the city where the old houses gradually fell away and where the surfaced road became a cart track, running parallel to the river—a no-man’s land inhabited by a thin phalanx of plane trees. One or two farmhouses beyond the high water mark, mostly uninhabited. Beyond them, the allotments, then the textile factory, its smokeless chimneys and the satellite apartment blocks, squalid beneath the rain.

  Trotti and Gabbiani got out of the car.

  Toccafondi caught sight of them and hurried over, carrying an umbrella. Despite the warm evening air, he was wearing his uniform leather jacket and gloves. He grinned nervously, touching his beret.

  “What is it?” Trotti gestured to where police lines had been put up. A small crowd had gathered, but there was no artificial light other than a police car with its main beam. It was hard to make out the dark, stumpy object that had been cordoned off.

  The object cast a long shadow over the ground.

  “Looks like a professional job. Badly mutilated, very badly mutilated. And then burned with petrol.” Grinning bravely, Toccafondi closed his eyes. “They cut most of his fingers off. Not a very pretty sight. I couldn’t help . . .” He swallowed hard, then the smile returned to his young face.

  “Who is it?” Trotti frowned and moved forward.

  The arms and the legs must have been tied together behind the back.

  Gabbiani remarked calmly, “You choke to death as your leg muscles can no longer resist the tension.” He snorted, “And then they burned him. Probably cut his tongue out, as well. Organized crime doesn’t like informers. I think he’s got a lot to thank you for, Piero.”

  Beltoni.

  Trotti stepped away from Gabbiani’s umbrella, ducked under the police rail and moved towards the black lump.

  Surprisingly, the flames had left much of the face intact. Everything else was carbonized—black like a burnt tire—but the face was untouched, cheek against the ground. The long hair had been singed and the empty mouth lolled open against the dusty earth that was forming rivulets of rainwater.

  Trotti crouched down in the headlights. The rain was now falling heavily, running down his face, seeping through his clothes.

  Piero Trotti looked at what had once been the body of Beltoni: addict, drug-dealer and police informer. Thirty-five years earlier a mother’s baby, and now dead.

  No more hunger or thirst, no more desires, greed or pride. The true peace of the senses. Tortured, strangled and burnt to little more than a cinder lying in the dust beside the river Po.

  “Too many deaths, too many deaths,” Trotti repeated to himself.

  Somewhere towards the city, there was a distant whine of a siren.

  Trotti stood up.

  “Gabbiani, for God’s sake, give me one of your Nazionali.”

  16: Kisses

  Spadano had offered him lunch, had even proposed driving out to eat somewhere in the surrounding hills, but Trotti declined. He was in a hurry to join the American girl and catch the first train to Rome.

  The general of the Carabinieri insisted upon lending Trotti a warm coat.

  “Be careful, Piero,” were his parting words. “An awful job to get the blood stains out. Take care of my coat, even if you won’t take care of yourself.”

  Perfunctorily they shook hands.

  Trotti turned away and, feeling the weight of Spadano’s troubled eyes on his back, walked down the hill from the cathedral, through the twisting streets of Siena.

  Trotti had reluctantly accepted the Gracchi folder; it made his heavy bag still heavier.

  A biting, wintry wind scurried across the vast openness of the Piazza del Campo, yet all the bars and cafés were doing good business. Tourists sat outside on the terraces, despite the cold and despite the threat of more snow.

  Trotti looked for the girl.

  Wilma was not waiting for him at the place where they had agreed to meet.

  Trotti felt exposed in the windy piazza and was in a hurry to get away from the open square.

  (“My advice’s to lie low and be careful, Piero.�
�)

  He entered several restaurants where lunch was being served.

  No American girl, just the smell of good food.

  It was in via di Città that Trotti found a café to his liking. The place was both warm and empty; no sign of all the tourists. Trotti opened the glass door and walking the length of the bar, went to the window that backed onto Piazza del Campo.

  He sat down and before long, the barman took his order of hot spremuta.

  Trotti’s eyes felt gritty and he wondered if he was going to come down with influenza. He needed to sleep. When the squeezed grapefruit juice came, it was sweet and hot and it rasped against the edge of his throat.

  With a frequent glance at the Piazza del Campo—in high summer, crowds thronged the square, jostling to catch sight of the Palio and the horses that the Sienese bet so heavily on—Trotti thumbed through the files that Spadano had given him.

  Outside, the clock on the tower chimed midday.

  A couple of tourists arrived in the bar. A man and a woman, they were probably English, in their late forties. The man was wearing the same waxed jacket that Pioppi had given Trotti a couple of winters earlier. He wore a matching hat that hid much of his face and he talked loudly to the woman. She sat with her legs together and her hands neatly on her lap when she was not drinking her hot chocolate. She was too attentive to be the man’s wife, yet there were no subtle intimacies to suggest that they were lovers. They looked happy, like old friends who had met after spending much of their lives apart.

  The woman wore a wedding ring; the man did not.

  Trotti sipped his spremuta as he sorted the photocopies—papers from the Palazzo di Giustizia in Trapani, newspaper articles, several photographs and an envelope containing a set of handwritten poems.

  (“Beltoni’s back in Italy, Piero. You don’t want to go looking for him? Then my advice’s to lie low and be careful. Stay with your daughter in Bologna. Stay with your grandchildren. With Francesca and the little Piera. Try to stay alive.”)