Badfellas (17 page)

Tom, mortified, was desperately trying to think of a way of shutting him up. The simplest method would have been a bullet between the eyes, to put an end
once and for all to this Calvary Manzoni had put him through ever since their paths had crossed.

“Who’s this Fat Willy you mentioned?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Fat Willy? What can I say about Fat Willy?…”

No! Not Fat Willy!
Tom tried to convey his thought. But Fred was only aware of his own excitement.

“Fat Willy was a
capo
, a boss, a bit like the Paulie character in the film you’ve just seen. His place in the hierarchy didn’t matter much, Fat Willy just hated injustice. He could shed a tear when you told him your troubles, but he would also feel quite justified in smothering you if you had trimmed a bit of his profit. You could talk to him about anything, except his weight – nobody knew exactly what it was, they just said Fat Willy was a
pezzo da novanta
, somebody of more than two hundred pounds – it was the name they used for all the big cheeses, the gang leaders. He was so impressive physically that when he walked down the street it was as though he was guarding his own bodyguards. It was in nobody’s interest to refer to his weight – not his sons, not his lieutenants, no one. You just had to tap his stomach and say ‘Hey you’re looking well, Willy!’ – you could be sure those would be your last words.”

Tom, horrified, nearly got up to intervene. Fred hadn’t mentioned that Fat Willy was one of the first snitches to be taken care of by the FBI and the Witness Protection Programme. In order to make him unrecognizable, the FBI had placed him on a draconian diet and he had shed dozens of pounds. The first time he had been allowed into town, Fat Willy, or Guglielmo Quatrini as he was really called, had dived into a doughnut shop and eaten the equivalent of what he had shed.

“Willy just beamed at life,” Fred continued. “He was always agreeable, always in a good mood, he always had a friendly word for the ladies, and a kiss for the babies’ cheeks, always happy. He only stopped smiling once, and that was when one of his sons was kidnapped. The kidnappers had demanded an enormous ransom, but Willy had held out, right up to the end, when he had received one of the boy’s fingertips in a dental floss box. He not only got his son back alive, he got his hands on the kidnappers. He shut himself up in his basement with them, with bare hands. Yes, believe it or not, bare hands! Well, no one knows what happened then, all I can say is the neighbour had to go away for the weekend to get away from the screams coming from Willy’s basement.”

The fifty people in the audience sat like frozen statues, hanging on the words of this man on the stage. A tremor of amazement passed amongst them, and nobody dared move or say a thing. All the rest, the discussion, the programme, all forgotten. One man was talking and they had to listen.

One spectator tiptoed out and went to ring his wife, who was down the road attending a meeting of the Green Party candidates for the next local elections. Basically, he told her to get over to the cinema club, as “something” was happening. She looked at her watch and suggested to the gathering that they might all go and see what was going on at the town hall.

Maggie, now tired of looking through the binoculars, was sitting at the listening table, wearing earphones,
absorbed in her neighbour’s conversations. She had just learned that Mr Dumont, the motorbike repair man, had been taking Chinese lessons for the last ten years for no apparent reason, and that his wife wasn’t really his wife but his cousin, that the unmarried mother at number 18 went and put flowers on Flaubert’s tomb in Rouen every month, that the French teacher lived well beyond his means, and won fortunes playing tarot in the back room of the only nightclub in the area, that Mme Volkovitch had knocked ten years off her real age in her dealings with officialdom, and that Myriam, at number 14, spent all her spare time searching for her real father so as, in her words, “to force him to admit to his paternity”.

During each of these sessions, she learned a little more about human nature, what motivated and moved people, what made them suffer – more than she could ever glean from any book or newspaper article.

“It’s that young computer guy who’s placing the small ads in the
Clairon de Cholong
,” she said, taking off her earphones.

Giving away PC XT computer, 14” screen with jet printer in good condition
. Obsolete equipment for which he could get nothing second-hand, but which could be very welcome to someone with no money. That was the sort of thing which thrilled Maggie the most, simple acts of kindness, small thoughts for others. If she felt drawn to the great humanitarian causes, she still had a lot to learn about such discreet and well-judged actions, inspired as much by common sense as good fellowship. Such actions often took the most unexpected forms. For example, her neighbour, Maurice, who owned La Poterne, the other big café in Cholong, had been on holiday in
Naples, where he had come across an ancient custom still practised in some of the bars over there. Given the price of an espresso taken at the counter (a matter of centimes), you would often see customers getting rid of their small change and paying for two coffees, and only drinking one themselves; the barman would chalk it up and give a free coffee to some indigent passer-by. Maurice, who wasn’t a particularly generous man, and who didn’t give much thought to any poverty around him, had nonetheless found the idea interesting, and had introduced it. He was the first to be surprised at how many customers played the game. And Maggie had made Maurice into one of her real-life heroes, for having introduced a custom that went against all the expectations of the times, and one you would have thought bound to fail.

Quint was planning his revenge. This man, who was expressing himself with all the confidence of a seasoned lecturer before his very eyes, was going to pay dearly for this performance. Tom sometimes forgot about the incredible stupidity of gangsters, and how their taste for bragging was, more often than not, their undoing.

“If you can see them in the streets? Is that what you were asking? Have you ever heard of Brownsville? It’s the West Point for the made men in a sense: once you’ve trained there you can go to the top. In the great days, in that little area about six miles square, you might pass a Capone, a Costello, a Bugsy Siegel (the one who founded Las Vegas) in the street. Or maybe a Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, or a Vito Genovese, who was
the inspiration for Vito Corleone in
The Godfather
. And there I’m just mentioning the legendary figures, but I could also name some of the foot soldiers who were just as responsible for the great moments of the Cosa Nostra. In Brooklyn, you could have passed any number of these guys, who didn’t have any legal existence! They didn’t appear in any official document, except maybe a police record begun when they were fifteen. And you wouldn’t have seen them just in the street – for example, a guy like Dominick Rocco, known as The Rock, he could kill someone in a cinema, just like where we are now, with an ice pick, and no one would notice.

In the third row, Mr and Mme Ferrier, long-time supporters of the cinema club, looked at each other incredulously.

“Is he making it up?”

“He’s a writer, dearest. The more unbelievable it is, the happier he is to make us think it’s true.”

The audience had trebled in size during the hour Fred had been talking. News had travelled and the curious flooded in from the neighbouring restaurants and cafés. Several times Fred had wanted to note down one of his stories to put into his memoirs, but he was on a roll and preferred to carry on with this exercise which had the audience at his feet. Tom was already planning to contact Quantico to consult his superiors, but how on earth was he going to be able to explain that Fred, not content with transforming his Mafia past into literature, had now embarked on a one-man show that would have filled Caesar’s Palace?

Di Cicco had gone to lie down in the next-door room and Caputo sat in front of a television with the sound muted – he had forgotten Maggie was there. As for her, watching and listening to her neighbours had put the craziest of ideas into her mind. She was carried away, helped by the grappa, into a utopia in which her neighbourhood had become a free zone that no longer operated according the old laws of indifference towards your fellow man. Her cheeks blazing and her heart glowing, she began to dream of a small corner of this earth in which the highest ideals of communality in human relations reigned supreme. Just two or three remote streets in which each inhabitant had set aside his or her own selfish interests and instead taken an interest in those of their neighbours. In this little Eden, any way of reaching out to others would be acceptable. You could admit to some weakness or confess to some error instead of sinking into denial. You could affirm the eternal possibility of redemption. Approach the person you had feared without really knowing them. Help someone in distress, despite the urge to run away. Dare to explain what had gone wrong. Satisfy those who are never satisfied. Intervene and mediate in some conflict. Pay back a debt even if it was no longer expected. Encourage a family member’s artistic ambition. Spread good news. Give up an unattractive habit for the sake of those around you. Pass on a piece of wisdom before it disappears for ever. Bring comfort to an old person. Make some tiny unnoticeable sacrifice. Save a life far away by forgoing some useless gadget, and all the others still to be invented.

Maggie, in this poetic trance, saw this whole little world falling into place, all it needed was her own contagious
generosity of spirit: she would concentrate her efforts on one neighbourhood in the hope of seeing them spreading outwards, into other areas and then into the whole town, and then the rest of the world. With a tear in her eye, Maggie offered Di Cicco a last drink – she was in no hurry to come down to earth.

“…Tony was famous for his energetic interrogations of suspected rats – he wasn’t called The Dentist for nothing. He ended up as Carmine Calabrese’s lieutenant. For made men, that was like becoming a high official. His career would never be meteoric, but he was safe from a lot of worries. It was a choice that the other wise guys respected. And yet he had the makings of a good
capo
, and God knows what he could have dreamed up to consolidate the empire.”