The Book of Hidden Things

by Francesco Dimitri

  ‘We’re here to talk about yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’

  ‘Signora Pecoraro, you almost killed one of us.’

  ‘To be precise, me,’ Tony says.

  She cackles, ‘I don’t almost do things.’

  A smile comes to my lips in spite of myself. The woman has spirit, you have to give her that. ‘Is your son home?’

  ‘Saverio!’ she shouts. ‘Saverio!’ she shouts louder.

  That makes Fabio jolt. He is in much better shape today – the photography session with Anna did him good – but he is still on edge. His father’s condition and his hatred for Casalfranco make this even harder for him than it is for Tony and me.

  ‘I’m coming, Ma!’ a booming voice answers. After twenty-odd years, it still stirs unpleasant memories. Heavy steps come down a staircase, each one a forceful beat on a drum, announcing a beefy man with a pissed-off face. Barefoot and bare-chested, he only wears a pair of shorts. Saverio was big when we were boys, and he’s got bigger. A curling tribal tattoo spirals up from his right side to his arm, ending in a circle of blades surrounding the wrist. A scar cuts through his left eyebrow. Oh yes, I remember that. Tony made it.

  When Saverio sees us, he stiffens. I can see his muscles tensing, and there’s a lot of them, so it takes a while to tense them all. I glance at Tony. He is cool as a cucumber. Saverio is a good head taller than him, but Tony thrashed him once and I bet he could do it again. Tony is like a terrier; you can pit him against an adversary twice his size and he will come out on top. He says that is because he loathes violence, so when violence starts, he is in a hurry to end it.

  When Concetta looks at her son, she does so with a pride which could be put to better use. ‘You remember Art’s friends?’ she says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Saverio says, his eyes fixed on Tony.

  ‘Hi, man,’ Tony says. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  Saverio steps forward, threateningly.

  I say, ‘Do you know what I do?’

  He has a puzzled look. ‘What you…’

  ‘What my job is.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck.’

  ‘You should, Saverio, because I’m a lawyer, and a pretty good one at that.’ I step towards him, my belly showing from under my shirt, my arms one third the thickness of his – physically harmless, I know. I also know that we are not in the Middle Ages, and this guy needs a reality check. ‘You remember what happened when your mum ended up in court, sì? Be my guest, hit me. Kick me, for all I care. Next thing you know, I will sue your ass, and I promise, you and your family will lose your fancy car, your house, your vineyard. I won’t stop until I have squeezed every last penny you’ve got squirrelled away under the mattress.’ It’s bollocks, of course – that is never going to happen, not for a little brawl between friends. But Saverio doesn’t know that. That’s the thing with men like him; when they were boys, their size and the sheer intensity of their meanness made them terrifying. They cling to that, then they hit twenty and real life begins, and one day they wake up and find themselves utterly powerless. In the grown-up world, brawn is futile. So is brain, ultimately. The one and only thing you need, the ultimate strength and source of power in this country, is an understanding of how to make bureaucracy work for you. No matter how much I find this depressing, I have been shown over and over again that it is exactly the case.

  ‘You’re in my house,’ Saverio repeats.

  I roll my eyes. ‘Only yesterday, you attempted to cause Tony grievous bodily harm.’ I pause, then lie some more. ‘We have photographs of your car, your number plate. We came here for old times’ sake, because we have known you since we were kids and we thought we could talk this out.’

  Tony chips in, ‘Personally, I wasn’t that keen on talking.’

  Saverio pretends to be on the verge of hitting one of us, but I know he won’t. I bet he has had his run-ins with lawyers, and he is scared enough of what we can do. I have seen men like him – I have seen them a lot – when I was a rookie, before I started dealing with the real scum, and hard as they beat their chest, they know that their place is at the bottom of the food chain.

  ‘Shut up or move, boys,’ Concetta croaks. ‘I’m watching telly.’

  She is smart. I get now why she made such a splash as a crook. She does not want to hear what could pass between her son and us, just in case things do end up in court after all.

  Saverio exits the room, and we follow him to the kitchen, another neat and tidy space. A scent of tomato sauce and basil, with just a hint of cigarette smoke. I notice an original fridge from the fifties, with its rounded shape, which I’m sure never moved from this kitchen since it was first put here.

  ‘So,’ I say immediately. ‘Yesterday at Art’s.’

  ‘I talk, I never see you again – is that the deal?’

  ‘Cross my heart,’ I lie.

  Saverio walks to the fridge and takes out a bottle of beer, which he opens. ‘Art’s my dealer,’ he says, after making a show of drinking in our face without offering. ‘He has good stuff. I was there to buy. I saw a car was chasing me, I freaked out. Thought you were Carabinieri.’

  Tony says, ‘And it seemed like a good idea to go head to head with a Carabinieri car?’

  ‘Seemed good at the time,’ Saverio says.

  Which is a badly delivered whopper. I move my eyes to my friends. Tony is not buying it either. Fabio doesn’t care. Sweating even more profusely than this muggy weather would account for, he ignores us, his eyes transfixed by something on the wall behind my back. I don’t want to be obvious and follow his gaze, so I turn to Saverio.

  ‘Art has disappeared,’ I say, trying to gauge his reaction.

  ‘He did a runner from the cops?’

  ‘He’s got friends in the Corona,’ Tony says. ‘So no, the Carabinieri aren’t really an issue here.’

  Saverio’s hand shakes at the mention of the Sacra Corona Unita, which goes to show that he does, indeed, know his place in the food chain.

  I say, ‘We’re looking for him. Do you have any idea where he is?’

  ‘I’m a buyer, not his mate.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’

  ‘A month ago? I don’t keep tabs.’

  ‘Do you know his girlfriend?’

  ‘What girlfriend?’

  ‘Maybe not his girlfriend, but there was a girl he fancied.’

  Something passes through his body – a quick reaction, swiftly concealed. He shrugs.

  I pinch the top of my nose. ‘I’ll be very clear with you, Saverio: all of Art’s mates, us and the others, want to find out what happened to him, and we are far more pleasant than the others. You show us goodwill, there could be something in it for you. But if word gets out that you didn’t help when you could, me suing you is not the worst that could happen.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out,’ Saverio says.

  Fabio wipes his forehead with the palm of his hand. He is dripping. ‘Who is…’ He stops, then tries again, ‘Who is that young woman?’

  He points at a framed picture on the wall, showing a woman who is maybe in her late teens, if that. She has dark eyes, a dark complexion, and curly black hair making a halo around a lovely face. Her smile is so bright and open it seems to embrace you. She is not beautiful, no; she is much more than that. She is enchanting. She looks as if she could walk out of the picture any moment, take your hand, and start dancing with you. She makes you long for that to happen.

  ‘My little sister,’ Saverio says. ‘She’s nothing to do with Art.’

  The young woman is on the beach, fighting playfully with a dog for the control of a Frisbee. The young woman has one side of the Frisbee in her long-fingered hands, the dog has the other in his jaw. The dog is big, white, shaggy.

  Like the one Fabio saw in the olive grove.

  ‘Is that your dog?’ Fabio asks.

&nbs
p; ‘Yeah, why?’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘I’ve not seen him in days myself,’ Saverio says.

  3

  On the first day of Art’s disappearance it became clear that we were suspected, not in a specific way, just in general. Everybody wanted a scapegoat and we were handy. We were with Art when he disappeared, we had been smoking weed, we couldn’t agree on the nature of the cry Art was supposed to have let out from the olive grove. We were natural suspects.

  On the third day, the media started talking about Art in the past tense, going from Art is a sweet kid who is everybody’s best friend, to Art was a sweet kid who was everybody’s best friend. A shift in consciousness had occurred. Every hut and every trullo in the countryside had been searched. Dogs and helicopters were on the hunt night and day; they would have found a living boy. A dead boy, though? That was far easier to conceal. The Carabinieri made us go through the events of the night more times than I care to remember. The olive grove was in a lonely spot. Did we really go there only to look at the moon? That wasn’t your typical teenage behaviour, was it? And how was it possible that our friend just vanished, in such a desolate spot, without us seeing where he went? We didn’t have any answers for them, which to overworked Carabinieri translated as: we didn’t want to give any answers.

  On the fourth day, the Virgin Mary spoke to Concetta.

  Mary made an unscheduled appearance in the Blessed Vineyard, with the specific purpose of telling Concetta the truth about Art. The truth being, Art was safe. He was safe in Her mighty bosom. That is, he was dead as a doorknob and in Heaven. The envy of men, the Virgin said, killed the poor, poor boy, but he is in a better place now, far from suffering and danger. By then the metamorphosis of Art from creepy weirdo to town’s dearest was complete (with the only exception of Fabio’s dad, who never strayed from his position that Art was an arrogant little brat who would return home when tired of playing hide-and-seek). Concetta said she didn’t need to explain what the envy of men was supposed to be. The implication being, foul play was involved, and who else but Art’s best friends could be the foul players? As for Art’s earthly remains, the Virgin Mary assured they were to be found in the shadow of a tree or beneath the weight of a rock, which covered pretty much the whole of Salento.

  Casalfranco lapped it up. Though only a minority actually believed Concetta’s – pardon, the Virgin Mary’s – words, they kept their options open. A dead Art, a bright young soul harvested before its time, with the Virgin Mary appearing to announce his fate, made for a moving story, and who doesn’t like a moving story? With a sprinkling of the mystical, too. We couldn’t compete.

  To the surprise of many, Art’s parents stuck with us; their son’s disappearance was not a game to them. On the sixth day, Art’s dad called me, crying, and said he knew we were good boys – like brothers to Art – and the things people in town were saying were vile, just vile. He made me cry, too.

  But then Art came back, with his bullshit story, and he instantly became the most profoundly hated kid in Italy. Concetta found herself in deep water. All those who had half believed her, which amounted to almost the whole of Casalfranco, felt like fools, and people will forgive many things, but they will never forgive you for making them feel like a fool. Our seer jumped to the front pages of the local papers, and the third or fourth of a few national ones, and not in a good way. Her blood-flavoured grapes became a national joke. She tried to spin the story saying that she had been misled by Satan, but that only made things worse. A famous comedian did a sketch with him as the Devil dressed up as the Virgin Mary, and speaking in the voice of an old man trying to pass as a girl. An instant classic – you can find it on YouTube. Concetta’s credibility was in tatters, her business over.

  One night, a couple of months after Art had returned, Tony and I ran into Saverio in the network of alleys by Don Alfredo’s church. Saverio was off his face, and he started shouting abuse at us. ‘That asshole friend of yours,’ he said, ‘why didn’t he just fucking die?’

  Saverio, who was two years older than us, had a reputation for enjoying a good fight. I made to ignore him and walk on, but Tony stopped and replied, ‘Your mum was making money on our and our mate’s ass.’

  Tony had a reputation, too.

  ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he added, ‘she’s a whore.’

  Saverio roared and lunged at him. Tony waited for him to come, and when the distance was just right, he kneed Saverio in the balls. Hard. Saverio stopped, doubled on himself, covered his crotch with his hands, gave a stifled whimper. A spasm moved through his body, from crotch to head, and Saverio retched a thread of viscous yellow mucus. It could have stopped there.

  Tony hit him again.

  And I cheered. The only reason I didn’t join in was that I had never been in a fight (which is quite a result for a boy growing up in Casalfranco) and I didn’t know where to start. It wasn’t very nice of us, what we did, but I think we deserve to be cut some slack. Everybody else was mad at Art because they thought they knew what he had done, but we knew we didn’t. All we knew was that bad things had happened. Art had confessed to us that he hadn’t run away, and when we asked what had happened instead, he just kept saying, I don’t know. That line terrified me. It still does.

  Tony slapped Saverio, then pushed him to the floor, and when Saverio was there, Tony kicked him in his face, only once, but hard, with the scrubby Doctor Martens he would always wear, cutting the gash into Saverio’s eyebrow. Then Tony spat on him.

  Saverio was sobbing, his head in his hands, his leather jacket soiled with puke and blood.

  ‘Fucker,’ Tony said.

  4

  I am in my parents’ basement, digging for my old guitar. It is a large, dark room, cluttered with boxes, old bicycles, broken furniture. A museum of family memories, though now we only use this house as a holiday home. With both me and my brother living in Milan, Mum and Dad bought a little flat and moved up north. They didn’t want to miss their grandchildren growing up. It was sweet of them – that’s what I tell myself when I resent them, which I do more than is healthy for a man my age. My big plan was to reinvent myself in Milan. That never happened, partly because it was difficult to do that with my family reminding me who I was supposed to be, and partly, I suppose, because I just didn’t have it in me. I am what I am, and if I am not overly fond of that, there’s nothing to do but suck it up.

  ‘You haven’t found it yet?’ Anna asks.

  ‘Not yet.’

  She came down with two glasses of red wine, after putting Ottavia and Rebecca in bed. I love this hour of the day, when the work with the girls is done and I have an entire night to myself before the grind starts again. Sleep is my favourite pastime, nowadays. Anna places the glasses on an old, dusty table and asks, ‘Can I help?’

  I gesture at a large chest, on which three smaller ones are piled up. ‘You could check inside there.’

  We had a family BBQ tonight, in my parents’ spacious back garden, lined with apricot trees, lemon trees and prickly pears. There is a stone-built wood-fired oven in the middle, which has not been used in a while. Dad knows how to make pizza, I don’t. Regular al fresco dining is one of the things I miss about Casalfranco. Along with the simpler lifestyle, the amount of pure oxygen in the air, the sea, the food, the landscape. I would move back, if that made sense financially. Maybe one day. I might even learn to make pizza too.

  Over dinner Anna asked the girls, ‘Did you enjoy your time with Dad this morning?’

  ‘He taught us how to shoot,’ Ottavia said.

  Anna made a mock shocked grimace. ‘Giving guns to his own daughters!’

  ‘They were water pistols,’ Ottavia hurried to explain. ‘He said we can only ever shoot those, and never at strangers.’

  Meet Ottavia: no sense of humour whatsoever. Which is sweet for a little girl, but I pray, when I pray, that she will acquire some before she turns into a teenager, or life will crush her soon enough.

  ‘Neve’ to st
rangers,’ Rebecca repeated. She believes that her older sister is the upper crust of sophistication, and so she apes whatever Ottavia says or does.

  I love my little girls, but, oh, they bore me silly. They quickly spoiled the good mood I was in earlier today – the good mood that comes from a dead friend and a secret mafia party. How screwed up am I?

  ‘Look what I found,’ I say. A crate of old toys. I take out an action figure, a muscular blond man in fur underwear and a chestplate. ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Do you remember those? I was mad for the toys, though I didn’t care much for the cartoon.’

  ‘You boys are weird,’ Anna says. ‘You wouldn’t be caught dead playing with a Barbie, but a naked body-builder called He-Man is fine.’

  I chuckle. ‘Help me out with these boxes.’

  We disassemble a pile. My guitar has to be somewhere around here. Mum and Dad would never throw it away. They are hardcore hoarders when it comes to family memorabilia.

  ‘Curiosity is killing me,’ Anna says. ‘How did it go with Concetta?’

  I give her a run-down of our meeting.

  When I’m finished, Anna asks, ‘And do you believe Saverio?’

  ‘It’s possible he was buying weed from Art, but the part about him taking Tony for a Carabiniere? Please.’

  ‘What was he doing at Art’s, then?’

  ‘That’s what I hope his sister will tell us.’

  ‘The stunning young woman.’

  ‘You like that detail, don’t you?’ I joke. ‘I have to tell you that Fabio is first in line.’

  ‘I don’t play fair.’

  ‘Of course you don’t, love.’

  ‘Is Fabio sure that the dog in the photograph is the same he saw in the olive grove?’

  ‘They certainly look the same.’

  Anna rummages through the boxes without talking for a while. Then she says, ‘You must promise me that you stop this thing the moment you sniff danger.’

  ‘I promise.’ Anna doesn’t know that moment is long past. She is right, we should stop. We should have stopped when we learnt that the Sacra Corona Unita is involved. I am not even sure I know what I am doing anymore. We won’t find Art’s killers. We won’t find his body, either. This is not about him, it is about us, me. I should stop. I will. ‘What about you? Any fun with Fabio?’