Badfellas

by Read, Emily, Benacquista, Tonino

  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 reinforce 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 himsel
f, 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 as 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 first 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?

  Matt waited until the wheel started turning, and then instructed his interpreter to take over. The latter stepped up to the loudspeaker. His voice echoed over the whole square. He issued a warning to the public: there was no threat to the inhabitants of Cholong, and everything would go quite smoothly as long as there was no resistance to the actions of this small group of Americans – he didn’t quite know how to describe them, and the word “delegation” came to mind. As well as this, there would be a reward of two hundred thousand euros for anyone who helped capture the American writer known as Frederick Blake, dead or alive. During the announcement, Chi-Chi and Guy passed around the notorious Times article about the Manzoni trial, which they had photocopied and were now distributing like a tract. Finally Matt told the interpreter to drive around the town making the same announcement from the candyfloss van.

  There were some, however, who stepped forwards, wanting some explanations about this “state of siege”. Matt suggested to Hector and Greg that it might be an idea to prove that they meant business. The latter, holding their MP5 9mms, asked the doubters to move aside as fast as possible, and then emptied their guns into the local artists’ stands. Vases and clay pots, glazed sculptures, glass lampshades – all flew up in thousands of pieces. Seascapes and portraits were perforated through and through under the helpless gaze of their artists. The charity stall, which Maggie was in charge of, was reduced to dust. There followed a terrified stampede out of the square; the music and the roundabouts fell silent, giving way to cries of panic which took a long time to die down. After a while, all that could now be heard was the rusty metallic creak of the baskets on the big wheel going round and round.

  Giovanni Manzoni had never suffered such a cruel reversal, even at the height of the wars between the families.

  His work had been destroyed before being completed. It had been still-born.

  All those hours he had spent at work, pondering every comma, carefully considering each verb before using it. He had even gone so far as to open a dictionary. All the love that had gone into this work, the fruit of his loins, the mirror of his soul, the song of his heart, all gone for ever. All that determination to seek out the truth about himself, without hiding anything – he had been offering his readers the gift of his entire life. And now it had all been reduced to dust in a few seconds, dust and rubble.

  This was worse than looking death in the face. Fred felt as though he had never even existed.

  Earlier on, listening to his wife’s curses, he thought he had tou
ched rock bottom. Now he understood that all pain is relative. You think you’ve lost everything, and then you find there’s so much more to lose. In less than an hour, Fred had buried his future, and a moment later his past had disappeared as well.

  As he felt his strength ebbing, he suffered a strange hallucination.

  A cohort of zombies filed through the room, men of all ages, with caved-in skulls, bodies riddled with oozing holes, drowned men with eyes popping out of their heads, a great parade of all the victims, direct and indirect, of Giovanni Manzoni and his gang. These ghosts bent over Fred, who lay prostrated on the floor, and gave him a little tap on the shoulder, enjoying this divine moment of revenge. They had waited so many years in silence, in Limbo or under the ground, waiting to reappear at the right moment. They had come to tell Fred that, by attacking innocent people, Gianni Manzoni had shattered the natural order of the universe, and the time had come to set that right.

  Quintiliani, who had never been strong on retaliation, didn’t have the heart to attack Fred: What you’re going through is nothing compared to what you’ve inflicted so many times on strangers who didn’t fall in with your tyrannical ways. So how do you feel now, deep down, Don Manzoni?

  “Say something, Fred. Just one word.”

  “Vendetta.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going in there, Quint. You and me.”

  “?…”

  “We’ll get them, you and me. There can’t be more than ten of them.”

  “Are you mad, Manzoni?”

  “Don’t count on any reinforcements. If we don’t get them, they’re going to get us. And until then they’re going to do a bit of damage.”

  “…”