Badfellas (25 page)

“It’s a bit hot in here, Uncle.”

“Does that matter?”

“If it goes over twenty-five degrees, there’ll be nothing left, not us, not the house, not the Feds, not the street.”

Fred gave his mobster chuckle, but felt a wave of heat inside him that could have wiped out the Rue des Favorites. Ben added the glycerine with a dropper and waited for it to rise to the surface before transferring it to another container. Then he had checked it with a slip of litmus paper, which had remained a fine royal-blue colour. Then he had solidified the paste by mixing it, amongst other things, with sawdust, rolled it up in pieces
of cardboard with a fuse in each stick. At five o’clock, a bit before the arrival of the other three Blakes, Ben had placed a quantity of dynamite sufficient to dig a second Channel Tunnel in an old biscuit tin. Then at last he was able to turn his mind to preparing the polenta, boiling it up, splashing it on the walls, beating it until his arms ached.

At the foot of the north pillar of the factory, he climbed onto the huge evacuation pipe which poured straight into the Avre; he jumped on it once or twice to test its stability. Then he went back to his uncle, who had just broken down the door between the goods-reception area and the main building. After checking with flashlights that no one was lingering there, they followed an old reflex and checked all the installations; all they found were containers containing goodness knows what, barrels of all shapes and sizes, steel piping, nothing transportable or saleable – most discouraging. They went back out and got to work. This was the interesting stage of Ben’s work – deciding on the best places to plant the explosive. This was where his sixth sense came into play; his intuition could guarantee a quick and efficient outcome, depending on whether you wanted a simple collapse or a proper explosion.

“Hey, Uncle, what do you fancy? House of cards collapsing or big bang?”

Fred thought that, it being night-time and deep country, they hardly needed to be discreet.

“Let’s have something spectacular – like the final explosion at the Coney Island fireworks.”

The nephew couldn’t help chuckling, but he took Fred’s request quite seriously. If he hadn’t chosen a life
of crime, Ben would no doubt have become one of those demolition artists who could make a whole building disappear in a fine cloud of dust. The last building he had demolished, on the orders of and in the presence of his uncle, had been an almost complete three-storey car park, with eight hundred spaces. It had been a long and tedious night, but those who had been there had, eventually, happy memories of it. Nowadays, on the exact site of the disaster, there is a small glass building, home to an import-export firm, Parker, Sampiero and Rosati.

Ready to obey his nephew’s instructions, Fred watched him work with the admiration he always felt for specialists in their field. In the past he had always surrounded himself with master craftsmen, in order to beat the opposition. You needed to make a guy confess everything and denounce his mother and father? Get Kowalski. He could break a man’s toes one by one without touching their neighbours – a true artist. You needed a good shot? Franck Rosello would raise his hand: he had been a decorated sniper in a war he never spoke about. His claim to fame was the single shot that had blown the head off a snitch in the van taking him to court. And even though Rosello never made the same exact shot twice, Fred had lain flat on the floor of the van when he had gone to court. To get into Manzoni’s Dream Team, you had to excel in a particular field: unearthing bugging devices, getaway driving and so on. This time Fred had called on his beloved nephew because of the dynamite-handling skills that had earned him his place on the team, and, as an added bonus, a new middle initial to his name.

“Now that we’re alone, tell me, Ben…”

“Tell you what?”

“That if they haven’t forgiven me, at least the others have understood why I talked.”

Ben had been dreading this conversation, and above all dreading having to tell the cruel truth. He was somewhat surprised at such a naive, hopeful question. His hero, Giovanni Manzoni, had used the word “forgiven”! Forgiven! God, he was a long way off the mark. He must be made to understand, once and for all, that whatever happened, there was never going to be any question of the Manzonis going home.

“I don’t want to upset you, Zio Giovà, but you’re fine here. The children are growing up, it’s a nice house, you’re becoming a writer.”

Ben, who was in exile himself, could imagine the terrible homesickness that weighed on his uncle’s heart.

“You’ll never go back, just get used to that idea. It’ll take two or three generations after Don Mimino’s death for the name of Manzoni to be forgotten. And between now and then, as long as there remains a single henchman alive who ever received a job, a favour, a roof, whose children he was kind to, he’ll empty his gun into your head without the slightest hesitation. You’ve become a bogeyman, Uncle; it’s not just the reward, it’s the honour that makes all the young ones want to kill you. Imagine the glory:
the man who killed Giovanni Manzoni, the number-one enemy of all the made men in America
. He’d be a living legend, and the younger generation would line up to kiss his hands.”

As he talked, he went on taping a bunch of five sticks onto one of the outer pylons, before venturing inside the building again to deal with some aluminium beams.

“Icing you, Uncle, would be like finding the Loch Ness monster, or killing the great white whale, or spearing the dragon. It would be a place on Mount Olympus, drinking from the Holy Grail, washing dishonour clean with your blood.”

Ben found these words painful to speak, but he felt they must be said to ensure the removal of all hope of return. Once he had placed the last charge, he took Fred by the shoulder and led him outside. They stood for a moment in the dark night, contemplating the still-intact factory; it was almost beautiful to Fred, like a bull coming into the arena, a boat about to be wrecked or a soldier going to his death. For the first time, he saw the hand of man behind such ugliness.

“You do the honours, Uncle.”

Ben unrolled a long fuse, lit his Zippo lighter, and handed it to Fred. Fred hesitated for a moment, wondering for one last moment whether this really was the only possible solution to the water problem.

He had done his best to be a good citizen, he had pursued all the normal channels. He had tried to obey the rules and use what legal methods he could. He had honestly sought to behave properly and had trodden the stony path from criminal to model citizen. By allying himself to others, he had shown a gregarious side quite alien to his normal instincts. All these events had triggered a new self-awareness in him; he began to wonder if this life in hiding hadn’t really changed him for ever, and awoken in him a sense of respect for the community. He had really wanted to believe that.

And now he gazed at the flame of the Zippo in his hands, still pausing, conscious of defeat. He felt
disappointed by society. It was not, as it claimed to be, ruled by a sense of common purpose, but rather by the single motive of profit, just like all other parallel and secret societies, starting with the one that had for so long been his own. He had given the legal world a chance to surprise him. All it had done was confirm what he had really known all along.

By lighting this fuse, he would be admitting to his impotence in the face of something that was too big to comprehend. How could one fight when the enemy is everywhere and nowhere? When it is not in anyone’s interest to listen to your troubles? When those who are profiting have no faces and no addresses? When individuals are dependent on politicians, who depend on lobbies whose interests are incomprehensible to the poor jerk who places his fate in the hands of administrative procedures as long as a piece of string? Fred would unleash his own form of unreason against theirs, which suited some people so well; he would raise the stakes now with an act of violence. No doubt his life would have been simpler if he had been able to back down once he realized that the enemy was too strong and too far away, but he had never been that sort of guy. He would give them his reply on this lovely spring night, beneath the great dome of the sky, in this quiet primeval atmosphere. Fred would make the gesture on behalf of all the men in the street who could only dream of doing so.

He held the fuse in his left hand and brought the flame close to it, holding it back for one last moment.

Even the night before, he might have renounced the action and gone home, avoiding his wife’s curses and Tom Quintiliani’s sanctions. But tonight was different.
It was the first night of the rest of his life. Fred had just realized that he would never go home, that he would die, somewhere, in some senseless place, under a foreign sky, and he would be buried in rootless soil. If he allowed this pain to enter his soul tonight, it would eat into him a little more each day until he was finally devoured. He had to react without delay, and put his whole past on a bonfire, watch it go up in flames, once and for all, in a preview of the hell which he had been threatened with from an early age.

He lit the fuse and backed away about a hundred yards and waited, his eyes wide open.

The entire structure exploded in a spray of flame that rose high in the sky. The huge explosion woke him up, and the blast was like a tidal wave through his brain. The geyser of light before him lit up the horizon. A shower of metal fell for half a mile around, and Fred watched the vestiges of another era scattering before disappearing for ever. To his great surprise, he felt relieved of a burden that he had been carrying within himself for years. The conflagration died down to embers flickering on the tarmac of the surrounding parking grounds. He gave a sigh of relief.

Fred accompanied Ben back to his car, and told him how to reach the main road to Deauville, where he could get a ferry and go to London, where he could fly back to the United States.

“By the time they get their act together, you’ll be in sight of the English coast. Quint will circulate your description to the airports, but actually it’ll suit him quite well if you’re not caught. I’ve made fools of them by getting you here; he won’t want it to go any higher. But they won’t make the same mistake again.”

Ben didn’t need a translation: they were meeting for the last time, here, on this little country lane, in an unknown country, with the sky on fire. Ben decided humour would be preferable to sentimentality.

“The owner of my video arcade is an old creep who’s always boring me about the ’44 landings. Now I can tell him I landed in Normandy too.”

The uncle hugged his nephew, a gesture which took them both back many years. Then he got off the path to let him turn the car, waved goodbye, and watched him disappear for ever. On his way back, Fred heard the fire engines coming, and hid in the bushes.

The children were still asleep. Fred found his wife on the living-room sofa, sitting completely still, listening to the radio.

“You stupid Italian bastard.”

He fetched a glass of bourbon from the kitchen surface, and swallowed a mouthful. Maggie wasn’t going to hold back her fury for long, and so he waited quietly for the second explosion of the evening. What he got was a contained fury, in a blank, almost soft tone of voice.

“As far as I’m concerned you can blow up the whole world. I haven’t got the strength to stop you any more. Your big mistake was to lie to me and manipulate me into helping with your plan. It just reminded me of things I’d rather forget, all those times when you made me your accomplice, when I was too young and stupid to know better. I spent all my time lying to the police, to our friends, to our family, to my parents, and finally
to our own children. I thought we’d finished with all that.”

He wasn’t particularly surprised by her words. Still he awaited the verdict with a certain curiosity.

“Now listen carefully. I won’t give you a sermon, Quintiliani can do that, it’s not my job. I just want to remind you that our son will soon be able to look after himself, and Belle would be much better off away from us. Soon it’ll just be you and me. Since I’ve been in France, I’ve found my way at last, and I can go on like this until I die, and I’m not at all sure that I need you beside me. In a few years’ time, I might even be able to go home, alone, after our divorce, back to my family. But you’ll die here. Not me. I’m not asking you to change, just to prepare yourself for that, Giovanni.”

Without giving him time to react, she left the living room and went up to bed. Shaken by her words, he poured himself another glass and swallowed it in one gulp. He had been prepared for anything but this, the worst threat of all – that she should go home without him. It was the very first time that Maggie had considered the idea, which was after all perfectly feasible. The local radio station was reporting a fire, probably arson, at the Carteix factory. He turned off the sound and glanced outside: the street was in an uproar, the neighbours outside in their dressing gowns, sirens in the distance. Exhausted by the long day, Fred went back onto the veranda to see if a few words might spring to his fingertips. Henceforth these memoirs would be the only link between Fred Blake and Giovanni Manzoni.