Badfellas (16 page)

“You really want to play this game?” he whispered in Fred’s ear.

Fred understood Tom perfectly, and interpreted the question as:
You creep, Manzoni, if you play this trick on me, I’ll make your life such hell, you’ll wish you’d spent the rest of your life in jail
.

“It’ll be a chance for you to ask me all the questions you’ve been wanting to ask all this time, and maybe today you’ll get some answers. Surely that makes it worth the journey?”

A suggestion that Tom read as:
You can go fuck yourself, you fucking cop
.

The lights went down, silence fell, and a white beam of light hit the screen.

Maggie parked the car in front of the house and waved at Vincent, who was smoking a cigarette at his window. As soon as she came into the living room she collapsed on the sofa with her eyes closed, still overcome by the sensation of having travelled through the looking glass. On her drive home, she had been unable to stop thinking of the room lent to the Newark branch of the Salvation Army, where every day tramps and homeless people would gather. Wooden tables and benches, and all those people sitting there for hours, battling against the winter cold, the boredom, the fear of the streets and, above all, hunger. She had looked through the filthy windows on occasions, at this goldfish bowl of misery, practically holding her nose just imagining the smell. She had several times wanted to go in to experience the dizzying sight of degradation, and what had stopped her
was not fear of confronting such squalor, but the strange feeling that she was worse off than them in her own degradation. These filthy men and women had their own sort of dignity. Not her. By accepting the values and way of life of Giovanni Manzoni, she had renounced any kind of self-esteem. If the local hobos could have suspected that this fine lady in her fur coat felt that way, they would have been the ones to give her some charity.

When the credits had finished rolling, Lemercier came back onto the stage and took the microphone to make a few general remarks about the film and its director. Before asking for comments from those who had something to say, he turned to Fred and invited him to join him. There was some encouraging applause and, as usual, Alain asked the first question.

“When you’re living in New York, are you aware of the presence of the Mafia, as shown in films?”

Tom, with a reflex gesture which betrayed his anxiety, reached for his holster.

“The presence of the Mafia?” Fred repeated.

He didn’t really understand the question. It was too abstract, it was like asking if he was aware of the sky above his head or the earth beneath his feet. He sat dumbly in front of the microphone, feeling ridiculous, and took refuge in silent thought.

The presence of the Mafia
.

Alain interpreted his silence as shyness due to the language barrier, and came to his aid.

“Might one see guys in the street like those three gangsters in the film?”

With this question, Fred caught a glimpse of the immense chasm which separated him eternally from the rest of humanity, the part that remains on the right side of the law. Gangsters fascinated honest people, but only in the role of fairground monsters.

Quintiliani almost raised his hand to say something. Not to put an end to this charade, but to come to the poor fellow’s rescue. It was very well being clever alone on your veranda, telling your particular form of truth with an old typewriter, all very fine… But to speak for your life as a gangster on stage, holding a microphone, in front of fifty people – it was like going before the grand jury again. Fred was like a schoolboy, all excited about reciting his poem in public, who can’t even remember his own name once he’s up in front of the blackboard.

There were low mutterings in the audience, and a feeling of awkwardness. Alain tried to think of some quip to offer support.
Might one see guys like that in the streets?
How could one answer a question like that, which seemed so harmless, but was in fact so brutal? Faced with all the stares, Fred was tempted to lie, to claim that the criminals were invisible, and melted into the background like chameleons; he could even question their very existence, suggest that they were a scriptwriter’s invention, like zombies or vampires. And then he could have made his farewells and fled back to his veranda, swearing to himself that he would never reemerge. But in the name of the very truth that he was trying to discover by writing his memoirs, he felt he did not have the right to run away.

“At the start of the film, in the first scene in the bar, there’s a guy who crosses the screen holding a glass, you
don’t get told his name, he’s wearing a grey waistcoat over a yellow shirt with rolled-up sleeves. That man really existed, his name was Vinnie Caprese, he was a regular on Hester Street at a coffee shop called Caffe Trombetta. He would have a strong espresso there every morning, like he’d done since he was eight. His mother used to make one for him before he went off to school, no bread and butter, nothing else, and the kid would go off like that after gulping down his espresso – sometimes if it was very cold she’d put a drop of Marsala in it to warm his belly. I’ve always thought that that sort of thing is what makes people into executioners. Just details like that.”

Despite her exhaustion, Maggie couldn’t get to sleep. She picked up the phone and suggested an evening visit to the G-men, who welcomed this unexpected distraction. Di Cicco got out three glasses for the grappa Maggie brought with her. She went over to the binoculars mounted on the tripod and pointed them towards the apartments that were still lit. Without the slightest mocking voyeurism or ill will, Maggie was now in the habit of watching the neighbours several times a week under the intrigued gaze of the two federal agents. The sample of humanity in the Favorite district was now her private laboratory – spying was her new science. If Fred regarded humanity as a grey and distant entity, Maggie refused to believe in the apparent banality of her neighbour’s lives.

“What is it that amuses you in all this, Maggie?”

“Nothing amuses me, but everything interests me. When I was young, I used to spend my time putting
people into categories, labelled with one function – one name was enough. Now the idea that everybody is in some way exceptional helps me to understand how the world works.”

She pointed her binoculars towards the little three-storey building at number 15, where four families and two single people lived.

“The Pradels are watching TV,” she said.

“She suffers from insomnia, it sometimes stays on till four or five,” Caputo said, sipping his drink.

“I wonder if he’s got a mistress,” she said.

“How did you guess, Maggie?”

“I can sense it.”

“She’s called Christine Laforgue, medical assistant, thirty-one years old.”

“Does the wife know?”

“She doesn’t suspect anything. Christine Laforgue and her husband came to dinner there the other night.”

“What a pig!”

This had been a frequent
cri de coeur
in the past, at the time when Giovanni and his acolytes had had “official” mistresses. They would parade them on their arms in selected places, to such a point that the wives would try and meet them in person, hoping to scratch out their eyes. Since then adultery had been very high on her list of deadly sins.

Maggie then looked up to the top flat, where there was no light.

“Has Patrick Roux gone out?”

“No. He set off on his tour of France yesterday,” Di Cicco replied.

Maggie, like an entomologist, observed the evolution of her subjects, and their interactions. Occasionally
she intervened directly in order to precipitate some development in their lives.

Patrick Roux was fifty-one, divorced, and worked as a bursar in a private school. He had just taken an unpaid sabbatical in order to fulfil a long-held dream – to crisscross the country on his beautiful 900cc motorbike. Knowing that bikers were much in demand for this purpose, Maggie had persuaded him to carry an organ-donor card in his wallet. Roux thought that this would bring him luck, and in any case he had no objection to the thought of his heart beating in another man’s body.

“I’ve got something here that might interest you, Maggie,” Caputo said. “It’s about the little old lady at number eleven, who looks as though she’d go straight to heaven, the one who lives with her daughter and son-in-law. Well, back in 1971, she poisoned an old neighbour’s dog. He never got over it and followed the animal soon after. It was a perfect crime.”

“And nobody ever knew?”

“She talked about it yesterday to a friend in Argentan. I suppose she wanted to confess to someone before facing her maker.”

God… Where had He got to? Maggie felt that by observing her neighbours so closely, she was doing the work that He should have been doing for his own creatures: watching over them and sometimes showing them the right way.

“Mr Vuillemin’s light is still on,” she said, surprised. “He’s supposed to be getting up in less than three hours…”

This was the baker in the avenue de la Gare, who had lost half his business since the arrival of a young
competitor. Like the others, Maggie had gone and bought a baguette from the new man, and had had the courage to give Mr Vuillemin her verdict in person: “His bread is much better.” How could this be possible? Nobody had ever complained about his bread for more than twenty years. It was no more or less spongy than any other, no whiter, it stayed fresh for the same length of time, so what was it? To find out, he had tasted it too. And looking at his dough, he wondered, with a sudden burst of nostalgia, where he had gone wrong along the way. And then he had decided to set to work and show this callow youth what he was made of.

Maggie couldn’t bear to miss a single detail of all these human stories unfolding every day outside her door.

“…Bill Clunan learned Italian in order to become a gangster. You can picture the type, both parents Irish – he studied books of Eyetie slang, ate every day at Spagho, practised swearing, even Catholic that he was, that must have stuck in his gullet, having to blaspheme like the Italians, calling the Virgin Mary a whore, that was the hardest thing, but what can you do, he wanted to join Fat Willy’s gang rather than any Irish one. If you ever go to Brooklyn and you’re on Mellow Boulevard around seven, you might see him; he’s got long grey hair brushed back, Ray-Bans on his nose, he’ll be playing Scopa with his mates, who still call him Paddy.”