Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  In Sicily we give the orders. And if you don’t want to wipe out the DC completely you do what we say. Otherwise we’ll take away your vote. Not only in Sicily but also in Reggio Calabria and all through southern Italy. You’ll only be able to count on the vote up north, and up there they all vote communist anyway. You can make do with that.

  Riina was now more quietly reminding Andreotti of his commitments. Politically, Andreotti had less room for manoeuvre than before. Vito Ciancimino, the former mayor of Palermo, and the Salvo cousins, his link with Cosa Nostra, had all been charged as mafiosi. A dossier on Salvo Lima had been tabled in the European parliament in Strasbourg. The maxitrial was being followed closely.

  Riina suspected that Andreotti now wanted to slither out of his undertakings to the mafia without losing the electoral power base Cosa Nostra guaranteed. It was another instance of the Andreotti double game. So Riina had to remind him. He had to remind Andreotti that he couldn’t distance himself, that Riina and Andreotti, like Lima and Salvo and the others in the room, were the same thing. Cosa Nostra is our thing and a man of honour identifies another as la stessa cosa, the same thing, and the four powerful figures present that afternoon were all the same thing and were in it all together. It made little difference, The True History said, whether or not Andreotti had been formally sworn in. Whether Andreotti’s finger had been pricked by a senior man of honour in the presence of other men of honour, whether he had dropped blood on to a sacred image and held it burning in his hands as he prayed that my flesh may burn like this holy image if ever I betray my vow. This, said the Palermo prosecutors, didn’t matter.

  The one thing that mattered, and what [Riina] wanted to remind [Andreotti] once again, is that whoever had made a pact of mutual loyalty and assistance with Cosa Nostra had got to understand that there could be no grounds for withdrawing from that pact for the rest of his life. And to keep that clearly in mind.

  At such a meeting, the kiss wasn’t absurd at all. The kiss and the embrace were inescapable.

  * * *

  BALDASSARE DI MAGGIO, the witness of The Kiss in 1987 and the man of honour who’d led the police to Riina in 1993, had started adult life as a mechanic. He was the son of a mafioso shepherd in the old mafia town of San Giuseppe Jato, thirty kilometres inland from Palermo, and three years older than Giovanni Brusca, son of the district boss. He’d been approached in his twenties and done his first killing in 1981 with the Brusca son. He’d had no idea who he was killing or why and knew not to ask. Then he was taken to a country property nearby and met Totò Riina and his wife and four children. The house had been made available to the Riinas by a Palermo doctor. After takeaway roast chicken, the boys told Riina they’d been impressed by Di Maggio’s grace under pressure. He’d returned the fire of a carabiniere. Four months later Di Maggio was initiated by Brusca senior. Over the next five years, Di Maggio had killed, for Riina and Brusca, twenty-three people in a variety of ways. He’d torched a number of houses, including an ex-mayor of Palermo’s, and dealt in drugs and public works. He’d become a particular favourite of Riina’s, who often said Baldo’s in my heart and made Di Maggio his driver. Thus, when Brusca senior was in jail and Brusca junior exiled to a remote island, Di Maggio was made boss of their cosca, their mafia family. He’d built a million-dollar villa, with swimming pools and pillars and original art work on the walls.

  It turned bad when he lost interest in his wife and fell for a girl that Brusca junior also wanted. It turned nasty when Brusca came home and wanted to take command as well. In early 1992 a conference was called with Totò Riina, to make the peace. At the end of the discussion Riina confirmed his trust in Di Maggio, and kissed him. Baldo’s not some old orange to chuck away. Di Maggio, however, knew his boss’s ways. He’d seen too many scenes like that not to realize Riina’s was a Judas kiss. He realized he was about to be killed. Uncle Totò had Baldo in his heart and was going to kill him. He was choosing the Bruscas. It was like that with Riina. Di Maggio fled with his heavily pregnant girlfriend to Canada. Unable to get a visa, they returned to Italy, going north to Novara where Di Maggio had a friend. The police knew this, knew about the quarrel, and arrested him in the first days of 1993, just after the birth of Di Maggio’s child. The violence of Riina’s Cosa Nostra in 1992 had plunged a lot of men of honour into crisis. Profoundly shaken by the terrible atrocities committed against judges Falcone and Borsellino, the leading man of honour and Riina intimate Gaspare Mutolo had decided to talk three months earlier. Cosa Nostra has undertaken an irreversible strategy of death, he said. It was the thought of being sent to Palermo, of being surrounded by men at Riina’s orders in the Ucciardone that now turned Di Maggio. I’m a dead man, he said. But I’m a man of honour. I can take you to Riina. And he did. And when Riina was taken, Di Maggio, Mutolo, Buscetta, Mannoia, all the pentiti who knew the most overcame their last inhibitions. Unknown to each other, in their secret safe houses in Italy and America, in 1993 the men of honour all started talking for the first time about Giulio Andreotti.

  * * *

  THE STRUGGLE to hold The True History of Italy up to the naked fifteen watt bulb taxed the wrists. It was a weighty history. By now the weak daylight that reached into the room had quite gone and beyond this tiny glow all was dark. Descending in the clattering old iron cage of a lift, I found the Palermo evening stroll outside at the height of its frenzied saunter. The streets were full of people purposefully going nowhere in particular. After a poke around Flaccovio’s bookshop, I walked around the expensive part of Palermo and observed the short sleek people who were doing their window shopping. Roney’s bar was full of decaying aristocrats, monied nullities and sinister, purposeful people. The shop windows were full of expensive things to buy. Apart from the inevitable and endless boutiques with laden racks of designer clothes and accessories, among them a lot more furriers selling ankle length minks than the Sicilian climate would seem to warrant, there were a lot of jewellers, a lot of watchmakers. Authorized dealers in Rolex and IWC Schauffhausen. And there were even more of those shops you saw all over southern Italy, that specialized in wedding presents. Heavy things in silver, in crystal, in porcelain, in gilt, and in horrid taste. Weddings were still big in the Mezzogiorno. Even the humblest were dynastic affairs. The trousseau mattered, the wedding dress, the reception. The wedding gift.

  It was now past closing time. Lights were going off, keys being turned in locks, shutters slammed down, alarm systems activated. The streets were suddenly empty. Where people went I couldn’t see, and never would later, however attentively I studied them on nights to come. They just vanished, moving with the same nonchalant and preoccupied directionless speed with which they’d earlier thronged the footpaths. They were, it occurred to me, in training. There’d been a thousand or so violent deaths in the crowded streets of Palermo over the last fifteen years, and very few witnesses. This was a population with some experience in melting away and always aware that the need might return. The streets at night were terribly empty. The streets were empty at night all through the south now. Nobody wanted to be a witness. You might as well be the victim. Having lunched on a mirage, I decided to go back to the little restaurant I’d found between the Vucciria and piazza San Domenico, into whose kitchen I’d seen the fish marketer disappear and where a grubby Persian cat had been sleeping on the doorstep.

  III

  A CASE OF KNIVES

  LIGHTS WERE on and people were sitting now under the umbrellas at the bottom of the dogleg lane that dropped precipitously to the restaurant and then twisted into the dark. It wasn’t a place you’d have felt like going down to at night without those lights in the window. The Persian cat was watching the outside diners like a jailer. I went inside to the corner of a clean uncluttered room where centuries of plaster had been scraped away, baring stone and beams. Some young people were drifting around in loose clothes. They looked like art students, and one of them was. The whole outfit was run by family and friends. One or two drifted over amiably with a vagu
e look of inquiry, and soon a saucer of green olives and anchovies was sitting on the table, and some bread, and some mineral water. A small woman with dark hair and dark eyes and precise features whirled up like a woodland bird. She perched lightly at the table and rattled off a long list of antipasti, first courses and seconds, and every single one of them came out of the sea. This was Palermo in summer for you. She thought spaghetti with sea urchins, and the steaks of some larger sea fish with a kind of sweet and sour onion and vinegar sauce, would be a very brave choice. I hoped it wouldn’t take bravery to eat them and she said, oh no. She hadn’t meant that.

  The spaghetti with sea urchins were excellent, the urchin eggs still raw and moist, flung into a pan with a little oil and garlic at the instant the spaghetti were flung in too and briefly tossed. This was a nearly ideal way of dealing with sea urchins. The warmth of the pasta and oil charged the flavour of the roe without killing it by cooking, and the pasta’s bulk prolonged without weakening the sensation. Sea urchins and I went a long way back, to a dinghy anchored off Sardinia. A friend’s son dived for them and we sat in the boat, cutting them open with a knife and scooping out the cruciform lines of golden eggs with the blade. The son also brought up huge oysters like plates from the sea bed, but these were for later, back at the house. At Trani in Apulia, on the Adriatic coast, men used to sell sea urchins on street corners on Sunday mornings, freshly cut in half and laid out on sheets of newspaper, a dozen half shells to the sheet.

  All the shellfish were wonderful in Trani. The fishing port on the Adriatic coast had been another bastion of the Normans and the Angevins and the Swabians in the Mezzogiorno, and the golden Norman cathedral standing on the water made you weak at the knees. You couldn’t buy fresh fish there though. Big refrigerated lorries carried off the entire catch every morning before dawn. Shellfish, however, abounded. They were for the locals. There were glossy mussels, sleek brown datteri di mare, sea dates, who lived inside narrow holes they burrowed in the soft yellow tufa below the waterline, cannelicchi, which were Chinaman’s fingernails, pipis, taratufoli, vongole, others whose names eluded me, though not the memory of their shape and flavour, the smooth mottled shells and the dark grooved ones. The mussels were excellent in Trani, and clean, and so were Apulian tomatoes, oil and pasta, so the Sunday urchins were naturally followed by spaghetti con le cozze, brilliant black shells, golden oil and unequalled intensity of red in the tomatoes. With chili, unless locals were coming to lunch.

  An elderly publisher in Bari showed me a trattoria in a dark and narrow street that as a prelude to its grilled fish and crustaceans from the Adriatic did a pasta dish of spaghettini with a little fresh San Marzano tomato flesh and a variety of shellfish and crustaceans, shrimps, clams, Chinaman’s fingernails. In Apulia they habitually used a finer strand of spaghetti than is usual elsewhere. It seems hair-like, almost Asian, and well suited to these almost souplike seafood dishes. It also took a lot less time to cook.

  The seafood there was why the place was frequented by malavitosi who even as one ate must have been plotting the birth of the Holy United Crown. Until the eighties, Apulia was unique in the south in having no organized crime, but mafiosi from Sicily and camorristi from Naples who were jailed there soon fixed that. The Apulians copied their initiation rites and soon the Pugliesi were taking lessons from nobody. A few years later the beautiful Petruzzelli theatre in Bari was torched and an age of placid decency went up in smoke.

  The grey-haired man who now brought over a bottle of white wine from nearby Alcamo was Pippo, the husband of the dovelike Anna Maria. Two of the staff were their sons. Emiliano had a Van Dyke beard and short hair and moved like a footballer and studied politics. The younger, with long, long straight hair and a Palestinian kefiah, was Dario, who studied art. A longhaired friend called Stefania was doing sociology. Pippo worked during the day for telecom and the Sant’Andrea, called after the piazzetta, was new. New in this form, newly theirs. Pippo and I were still talking several hours later, long after the last diners had left. The staff had gathered around the largest table to eat, and when the cooks emerged from the kitchen I recognized them from the first morning at the Vucciria. The plump bespectacled figure was Totò, the head cook, who came in lifting off his toque and dabbing at his beaded forehead. The knifeblade silhouette from the market was Nabil’s. He was a Tunisian, a fisherman’s son from just across the water, which explained his expertise with fish. He was wearing another embroidered cap.

  A bottle of brandy came out and friends drifted in. It was about two in the morning. Most of the arrivals were students. Vincenzo was an architecture student living in the Vucciria. He talked eagerly about Glen Murcutt. He said he would have given anything to work with Murcutt in Australia. I told him quite gently Murcutt had no assistants, that he always worked alone. Vincenzo was the son of a friend Pippo had been talking about. This friend had withdrawn a few years earlier from regular work and life in society to live in an old mill with a few thousand books. He’d known Guttuso and Sciascia, and knew a lot too about the history of Italy since the war and the artistic life of Palermo. They were all going to the mill on Sunday, to make a barbecue and have a day in the country, and asked me along.

  A couple of days later Pippo and Anna Maria and Dario and I set off in their knocked-around old Fiat on Sunday morning and headed for the mill. The others were travelling separately. The Fiat was loaded with food to barbecue at our destination. Fresh baby mackerel, ropes of Sicilian sausage, lambs’ intestines knotted up with fresh rosemary and chickens to roast in the mill’s oven. Palermo faces north-east, looking out over the sea to the continent and over its shoulder, as it were, to the new world and Africa. The town’s settled into the fertile curve of the Conca d’Oro, a rim of richly orcharded lowland, the sweet ground of orange and lemon trees, almonds and olives, lying between the Mediterranean and the other world of the Sicilian interior, mountainous, arid, closed, inaccessible. If it weren’t for the sea’s perpetual promise of escape, you’d feel trapped in Palermo, menaced by the jagged teeth of the encircling rocky hills. Getting out of the city and out of the Conca d’Oro, the coastal golden bowl, and heading inland meant climbing steeply. Leaving from the Vucciria, we headed south-west and within minutes the battered Fiat was high above the city, winding up a dry precipitous hillside. We went through a mountain pass and into a windswept desert landscape of dead grass and dirt and huge white boulders. The remote scattering of these giant stones generated a sense of ancient violence. It was utterly bleak and sterile. The blue sea of the gulf and the dark green sea of citrus trees and the busy life of the city had vanished. The air was suddenly colder. We fell silent. Always in the high country of Sicily you sensed exhaustion and abandonment. It was like walking into a deserted house. Anna Maria, who had been working until three in the morning, was now asleep. Dario was hunched over Il Manifesto, maybe the last daily in Europe to proclaim itself communist.

  A road sign woke me from my daze. A black on yellow notice, as we curved over the shoulder of a hill, announced Montelepre. Montelepre had been the home of the bandit Giuliano. The hills of western Sicily, the wild and remote interior, were just above Palermo. Half an hour’s drive from the city centre. Dario remarked, pulling up his kefiah and lighting a cigarette, the roads were worse in those days, and bandits harder to chase, but the nearness lent a new weight to that judge’s sardonic words about the bandits being inaccessible only to the police. We passed the grim, closed town huddled on the hill and spun downhill through land that was looking green again. Soon we were at the mill, which stood high in a valley that swept down to the rich and mafioso town of Partinico and the sea. Montelepre stayed just in sight behind us, a bleaker reminder higher up, a cluster of walls and roofs you saw when you looked back over your shoulder at the barren hills. Dogs and cats came cartwheeling out to greet us. Pasquale was less excited by the invasion of city life. He was working at something over the kitchen table, half moon glasses jammed on his nose.

  The mill had stood t
here since the middle ages. The building had accreted over centuries into two high storeys and three big wings. It’d milled the grain of Sicily until sugar cane arrived from Egypt in the eleventh century, the time of Arab Sicily, when it was made over to process sugar. When Columbus discovered the Americas four hundred years later, he’d taken cane plants with him, and sugar went west, to the Azores, the Indies, Brazil, and Sicily’s sugar cane plantations were superseded by the slave estates beyond the Atlantic. Sicily and the mill reverted to grain. The rusted machinery of Pasquale’s mill had stood unused for years, and the little torrent that had powered the wheel no longer flowed under the rambling mill building. Part of the stream still flowed down the steep and stony hill outside, watering the large neglected gardens around the mill and the overgrown fruit orchard.

  Vincenzo went off to fill the demijohns with yellow wine, which was getting low, and Pippo built up a big fire in the courtyard from sticks and twigs we gathered. We sat round drinking the yellow wine and eating fresh bread and arranging the baby mackerel and the lambs’ intestines and the rope of sausage on a gridiron. The dogs and cats looked on attentively. Yellowing leaves were coming down in the wind from the vines that grew on the walls. The mill felt a lot closer to Montelepre than it did to fat coastal Partinico, and summer was over. We could see scuds of rain coming down on the hills near Montelepre. The dead leaves eddied in little unseen vortices, the column of smoke blew across the courtyard and a few drops fell. I wandered off to the disused wheelhouse, and poked around the great rusted wheels inside the gloomy dusty cavern that had once been the throbbing heart of the place. It too was now used, like most of the other dark corners in this vast place, as a repository of printed matter. Great piles of old reviews were stacked here, spiders racing lightly over them as they toppled into dust. Pasquale took me upstairs.