Badfellas (12 page)

“You’ll have to leave the United States,” Quint said.

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“We’re living in a cynical age, Giovanni. The whole country is now following this soap opera. It’s called
How Long Will the Manzonis Survive?
It’s a reality show, and three hundred million viewers are watching.”

“And the end of the show is the end of my family?”

“Europe, Giovanni. Does that word mean anything to you?”

“Europe?”

“Exceptional procedure. Don Mimino’s guys can cover this country, but they can’t do the whole world. They haven’t got any connections in Europe except in Italy. You’ll be safe there.”

“You’re ready to cross the ocean to save my skin?”

“If it was up to me, I’d ring one of those crime-team guys right now, I’d do it for free, just to see a scumbag like you with a bullet in your head, which is what you deserve. But the trouble is, you dying would give organized crime twenty years of impunity, with all that crap about
omertà
and sealed lips. On the other hand, if you get out of it, I’ll get a list of rats long enough to keep me going for the rest of my life and it’ll pay for my retirement. It’s what Washington wants. Your survival is worth a lot to us, and you’re much more useful to me living than dead.”

“If that’s the only solution, then I want to go to Italy.”

“Out of the question.”

“It would give some sense to us being in exile, otherwise there’s none. Let me get to know the land of my fathers, I’ve never been there. I promised Livia the day we got married that we’d go there some day. Her grandparents were from Caserta, mine from Ginostra. They say it’s the most beautiful place in the world.”

“Sicily? Great idea! You might just as well walk around Little Italy with a placard saying HAVING FUN IN JAIL, DON MIMINO?”

“Let me see Italy before I die.”

“If I land you in Sicily, you’ll be made into
spezzatini
in less than ten minutes. Think of your family.”

“…”

“Talk to Maggie, we’ve still got a little time.”

“I know what she’ll say. It’ll be Paris, Paris, Paris – all women dream about it.”

“To be quite honest, I’ve spoken to my bosses, and Paris is one possibility. Also Oslo, Brussels, Cadiz, with a slight preference for Brussels – don’t ask.”

A few weeks later the Blakes were installed in a quiet building in the second
arrondissement
in Paris. Once past the first few months of adaptation – new life, new country, new language – they got into an everyday routine which, without really satisfying them, helped them get over the trauma of the move. That was before Fred began single-handedly undermining the protection programme.

Both arms in plaster, suspended by straps to the bed-head, Didier Fourcade, the most sought-after plumber in Cholong, watched his wife sleeping, not daring to wake her. The pain had subsided thanks to powerful analgesics.

He relived that morning in his mind – how, suffering the pains of hell, he had pushed open the double doors of the Morseuil clinic with his shoulder. He had presented himself at the admissions desk, with his arms in the air, like a flightless bird, torn between pain, shame and terror.

“I’ve broken my arms.”

“Both of them?”

“It hurts, for God’s sake!”

An hour later, in plaster up to the elbows, he had had to face questions from an intern who walked around him without taking his eyes off the X-rays of his arms.

“Fell down the stairs?…”

“I fell two floors on a building site.”

“It’s odd, you can see points of impact, as though you had been hit… Like hammer blows on the wrists and the arms. Look, there.”

Didier Fourcade turned away to avoid another wave of nausea. He was still haunted by the sound of his own screams as that psychopath had hammered at his wrists. He was taken home in an ambulance, the straps were fixed up and he was put to bed, all under the amazed stare of his wife, Martine.

They had got married twenty years earlier, surprised at wanting to commit to each other only three months after meeting, but unable to prevent themselves. However, as though to counterbalance the euphoria of the first years, the boredom of daily life had caught up with them sooner than with most couples. Both had begun to daydream, imagining a third party entering the equation, imagining a secret life, and in the end living one for real. As long as their relationship was not poisoned by bitterness and reproaches, they had remained together, nostalgic for their lost happiness, and always ready to believe that some small incident might bring it all back. Once their physical passion had died down, they had become prudish with one another: she would lock the bathroom door, turn her back to him when doing up her bra and draw away when she touched his skin by mistake. And for the last few years both had begun to wonder whether any couple could survive this physical distance.

Now he found himself watching her sleeping, just as he had done in those early days and nights, and the sight made him thank God for having sent him Martine. She was resting at last, emotionally exhausted by this
accident which had forced her to perform some unusual new gestures: she had had to spoon-feed Didier, wipe his mouth, hold a glass to his lips. She, who had never smoked, had to light a cigarette, put it between his lips, and take it out to tap off the ash. How could he have had such a terrible fall? Supposing he had fallen head first? She had often dreamed of freedom, but now she had been offered a glimpse of life without him and the prospect had filled her with horror.

Didier had bravely faced all that day’s ordeals, until now, at 2.17 a.m., when a horrible itch started up, down by his perineum. About ten years earlier he had picked up a skin complaint from God knows where. The doctors had assured him that the tests were negative, that it was benign, that there was nothing much you could do about it, that it would go the same way it had come, but still, at least once a day and according to ambient heat and sweatiness, he was seized by an irresistible urge to scratch between his thighs. It was an awkward place to have to scratch during the day, and he often disappeared into toilets, or went back to his car for no obvious reason, returning almost at once. The only way to achieve some form of relief was to wash the affected spot with dermatological soap, dry it thoroughly and, in times of great heat, sprinkle it with talcum powder to soak up the sweat and alleviate the friction. He, a plumber, had insisted on installing a bidet in their bathroom, to the great surprise of his wife, who couldn’t see the point of it, and indeed he was the only one who used it (it was a masterpiece of a bidet, ultramodern – he had put his all into it). In the morning, when he got up, the jet of water soothed the patches which he had scratched during the night, sometimes drawing blood. On summer evenings,
he would sometimes take a hip bath as a late reward for a sweaty day spent resisting the temptation to put his hands between his legs in public.

By 2.23, the itch had become intolerable. He had felt it coming on since the early evening, but he had held out, like a soldier biting his belt to make pain disappear. His battle with himself had taken the form of cold sweats, a strange shuddering of the shoulders – his whole body was begging for release so forcefully that eventually all qualms were swept aside. He woke his wife, calling her name, begging her to scratch his “perineum” – a word he had learned at the dermatologist’s, along with “scrotum”. Such precision made her hesitate; Didier always called a cat a cat, and a tomcat a tomcat, even with people he hardly knew. This word “perineum” was hiding something, it was a roundabout way of saying “scratch my balls”, but still, she was in no doubt about the urgency of the situation. Guided by her husband, she slipped her hand into his underpants, then under his testicles, a gesture she hadn’t made for a long time. He yelled when she found the crucial spot:

“Harder!”

The happiness he felt at that precise moment was so intense that it was soon followed by an erection.

To distract themselves from the insomnia that they were both suffering from, Fred and Maggie watched a film late into the night. She was feeling guilty at lying about the
Secours Populaire
, at having secrets from this monster of a husband whom she still loved despite everything. He, for his part, felt unable to give an honest answer to
the question she had asked when she came home: “How did it go with the plumber?”

What he had done to Didier Fourcade could well imperil the fragile equilibrium that she and Quintiliani were trying to maintain. Fred did not even dare to imagine what would happen if the Feds got wind of the story. However, he didn’t have much to fear on that front – the fear he had seen in Fourcade’s eyes guaranteed total silence about what had happened in the cellar. Fred knew how to arouse that sort of terror and how to fine-tune it as one might twiddle the knobs on a radio to find the perfect frequency.

At 3.06, Maggie had finally dropped off on her husband’s shoulder. When the film ended, he carefully put her head back on the pillow without waking her, and went down to the veranda. For the first time in his life he was creating rather than destroying, and even if the result turned out to be laughable in the eyes of the world, he felt that he had at last begun to exist.

Fred removed the paper from the carriage, refrained from rereading it, saving that moment for later, and went back up to Maggie, where he went to sleep with all the satisfaction of a job well done.

The writer Frederick Blake had recently begun going to bed at that time of the night when insomniacs wake up, children have their nightmares and lovers separate. After long hours of work, only the prospect of reading his work through when he woke up would send him to bed. In the past his nocturnal activities varied according to the times and the seasons; sometimes he would be busy calling in debts, or loosening tongues or dealing with those individuals for whom the bell was tolling. All that effort couldn’t have been conceivable without the prospect of leisure. Here the choice was between ferocious card games, women who were up for anything and, most frequently, terrifying drinking sessions from which you emerged walking stiffly, your back ramrod straight, before going home. Since turning government witness Fred had been sleeping like a hunted animal, a sleep filled with painful dreams that left him in a zombie-like state for the whole of the following day. Now his encounter with the Brother 900 had revived a forgotten taste for nocturnal activity. The excitement he felt when faced with a blank page brought back some of those past thrills, and revived that particular intensity. At such moments, he couldn’t have cared less whether the words he was writing would ever be read, or if the sentences would even survive him.