Badfellas (28 page)

Matt distributed ready cash and mobile phones, and then had a word with the interpreter, who was also the driver and guide, who suggested that they follow the banks of the Avre on foot until they reached the town. After some last-minute words to his troops, Matt led the march on Cholong.

As they got nearer to the town, strange and yet somehow familiar sounds began to reach them: a well-known racket, loud shouts and fairground music, the universal sound of a funfair. The death squad began to imagine the most absurd hypotheses.

“A welcoming committee?” Julio suggested to try and relax the atmosphere.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” said Nick. “I’ve seen black-and-white films of that. In Normandy, as soon as they
see a group of Americans approaching, they bring out the marching bands, and the girls and the firecrackers too, it’s a sort of tradition.”

Matt signalled to them to stop, when they were about to cross the bridge which marked the entrance to Cholong.

“What’s all this crap?” he asked the guide.

The guide went up to a poster stuck to a tree, which provided the answer. He explained as well as he could that it was the festival of Saint Jean.

“Well, perhaps we’re in luck,” said Matt.

“I’ll do whatever you want, but get me away from this monster, Quint. What happened on Thursday will happen again and again, he’ll find other Carteix factories, whether you watch him or not. He’ll set the whole town on fire, he’ll take over the businesses for his rackets, he’ll start some secret gambling den, he’ll terrorize the local council with a baseball bat. Giovanni was born with destruction in his soul, and when he finally dies his last thought will be a curse, or if he regrets anything it’ll only be not having wreaked enough destruction.”

Fred, sitting under the kitchen window outside the Feds’ house, was sobbing bitterly. His intuition had been right: Maggie had gone over to the enemy. He was making a superhuman effort to turn the geyser of rage that he felt rising within him against himself and not them. His life had been thrown to the dogs, and by his lifetime companion. He stopped himself from banging his head against the stone, in case it made the
wall shake and alerted them to his presence. Quint had become the strong man of the Manzoni family, perhaps even its saviour.

“Belle and Warren are doomed as long as they live alongside that son of a bitch,” she continued. “It’s him Don Mimino wants, not us.”

Fred bit his hand, and only unclenched his jaw when his incisors had broken the flesh, but even then the pain was not enough to numb the pain Maggie was inflicting on him. Quintiliani was going to take such sadistic pleasure in separating him from his loved ones; Fred would be stripped of all dignity and pride, until he was prepared for any abasement and humiliation, just for the sake of hearing their voices on the telephone. The king of agents, himself so long separated from his own children, hadn’t expected such a bonus; Maggie had just supplied him with the sweetest revenge of all. Fred, desperate to relieve this searing pain, was again tempted to knock himself out by banging his head on the ground. Who on earth could put up with such agony? Fred was probably the only person on earth who didn’t know the answer to that question. It was the victims.

The town was turned upside down: it was a good moment to avoid attention. Nobody would notice them in the general confusion. Matt sent two groups of men on patrol through the town and suggested that the five others should melt into the crowd and try and pick up information as to the whereabouts of the Blakes. The latter were suspicious at first at being sent into the kind of action they weren’t expecting. Most thought it was funny.

The caretaker at the Jules Vallès
Lycée
had deserted his post in order to go to the funfair with his family, and so Joey Wine and Nick Bongusto easily got into the school. All they had to do was put their foot on the electronic locking mechanism and vault over the gate; then they stopped and tried to decipher the school signposts. Joey followed the arrows that said Reception, Office and School Hall, and advised his colleague to head for Refectory, Nurse and Gymnasium.

He smashed down a glass door and got into a corridor which led to the school offices. Joey had been quite prepared to do some terrorizing in order to find out little Warren Blake’s address, and was somewhat disappointed to find himself alone in this long grey pebble-dash building. Instead of just breaking a couple of arms, he was going to have to open the metal filing cabinets himself and riffle through them. Bored and exhausted after the first drawer, he knocked the others over and then pulled the cupboards down too. Then he went into the headmaster’s office, sat down in his chair and looked through his drawers; one was locked, so he forced it open with a paper-cutter. He found several notes which he automatically pushed into his pocket. Then he wandered on until he came to a classroom, which he couldn’t resist going into.

Had Joey ever been to school? On reflection, he had probably missed some good times on the benches of the Cherry Hill public school in New Jersey, a school he would avoid each morning in order to join up with the gang on Ronaldo Terrace. He had never seen a blackboard so close up, and the smell of chalk meant nothing to him. He scratched a piece of chalk on the board; it made a strange noise which made his skin tingle. So was it this
little white stick that made all the difference? Did this little white stick contain all the knowledge in the world? Could it demonstrate everything, prove that God did or didn’t exist, that parallel lines meet in infinity, that the poets knew it all? He couldn’t think what to leave as his mark, what word, number or drawing, so, after a little hesitation he wrote in large letters JOEY WAS HERE, as he had done so often before in the toilets of bar rooms and nightclubs.

Bongusto, after crossing the playground, went into the gymnasium, where he yelled a few obscenities, which echoed around the space. He rolled a cigarette and began a tour of the equipment; he hung from the railings, tried to climb a fifteen-foot knotted rope, inspected the shelves full of football shirts; then he picked up a basketball and examined its profiling. He thought it looked incredibly like a world globe. The strange thing was that Nick had never held a ball before. He had watched hundreds of games over many years. He had waited for young basketball players at the entrance to playgrounds, in order to offer them all kinds of substance in pill or sachet form, but he had never joined them for a bit of shooting practice. Later in the arenas, he had organized the betting and watched the stars in action, he had even got to know some of them, at times when he had been in charge of bending them or scaring them shitless, depending on the instructions he had been given. He knew the rules and the players better than anyone, and he could have been a player himself, with his physique, his height, those huge platter-shaped hands, that shaved head. And yet he had never felt the rough rubbery texture of that red ball between his hands. He held it now and took it out to
the basketball court in the playground, stood at the top of the key and took a deep last puff of his cigarette stub. He had a difficult choice before him: either he could shoot the first basket of his life, or he could remain the only American never to score once. Joey watched him through the window striking a basketball player’s pose, and whistled encouragement.

Paul Gizzi and Julio Guzman, for their part, felt lost in a ghost town, wandering around empty streets past shuttered shops. They had never seen streets like these, narrow and slightly sloping, edged with couch grass and ivy, with branches of apple trees leaning over the walls, fragrant shady streets with unpronounceable names. They stopped in front of the only shop whose name they understood: SOUVENIRS.

Gizzi, at forty, had retained his bad-boy look. He had straight, short, pale-brown hair, with a quiff in the middle of his head, hazel eyes and a dimple in his chin. He took a little camera, which he always carried with him, out of the inside pocket of his green jacket, pointed it at a little white ceramic well and took photos of it from several angles.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Guzman asked.

“Can’t you see? I want a souvenir of a souvenir. I know someone who’ll like that.”

Guzman, a chunky little bulldog-like figure, who had been impatient since birth, grabbed the butt of his rifle and hit the window, smashing it with a few blows.

“There you are, take it.”

“Guzman, you’re sick.”

“Me, the sick one?”

Gizzi had taken the photo for his sister, Alma, who was fifteen years older than him, who had remained a spinster because of a fiancé who had left town when he
heard that the Gizzis had very close links with the Staten Island family. A little reluctantly he picked the object out of the broken glass and blew the dust off. He could already see Alma’s smile.

Franck Rosello, on the Place de la Libération, his usual taciturn self, was wandering around the stands, unused to such activity. He stopped for a moment in front of a display of pottery and plaster figures representing religious or bucolic figures. Then, seeing all the children stuffing themselves with sweet things, he took a fancy to a red toffee apple dripping with caramel. Without forgetting the ever present possibility of running into his old boss, Manzoni himself, he made sure none of his colleagues could see him approaching the candy van. He was a childhood friend of Matt’s, adopted by Don Mimino’s family and brought up as a Gallone. He had developed his talent as a sharpshooter in Giovanni’s gang, and had become a specialist in the elimination of witnesses. He had thus been instrumental in the cancellation of several trials and in saving the skins of several high-up bosses of the Cosa Nostra. The brotherhood was indebted to him and treated him like a hero. He was paid by the sack-load for each contract, and had never spent a single day behind bars; he had a clean sheet despite twenty years of loyal service. His head count included several famous snitches, such as Cesare Tortaglia and Pippo l’Abruzzese; he had only had one failure, and that was Giovanni Manzoni. If the circumstances were right and Matt was planning a long-distance shot, Franck would get a second chance. His mouth stuffed with toffee apple, he stopped in front of the shooting stall, which reminded him of the one at the funfair in Atlantic City, where he had been born.

“Three euros for five genuine bullets,” the man said. “You can win ten to fourteen points with each shot, fifty if you hit the red, and a hundred if you hit the bull’s-eye. Four hundred points, you get a teddy bear. You American?”

Franck only understood the last word and put a five-euro note on the counter; he picked up a rifle and took aim. Without adjusting his aim, he pulled the trigger five times. The man showed him four scattered holes, the fifth having gone off the target. The next time, Franck was able to correct the parallax caused by a slight curve in the barrel and achieve a total of four hundred and fifty points.

The stall-keeper hesitated before surrendering to the evidence. Four hundred and fifty? At a second go? Nobody had ever had such a score. Even he, with all his own equipment, wouldn’t have been able to do it. And yet, holding the card up to the light, he could count four strikes in the bull’s-eye and one on the red. Franck was about to leave the stand without his prize when he saw, standing at his knee, a little girl on her own, fixing him with a stony look. Franck saw an indignant message in those huge still eyes, which left no doubt as to its meaning. He lifted the little girl up to face the stuffed animals hanging messily above the range. Without hesitating, she pointed at the biggest of all, a gorilla five times her size.

“You need eight hundred points for that one,” said the man, exasperated.

Franck lined up a few coins and totalled five hundred points with five bullets; the holes joined together in the bull’s-eye like the petals of a single flower. Once again the gypsy studied the card with disbelief, and could
only see three holes – where were the two others? The American had the devil’s own luck, but that didn’t mean he was going to get the show prize – it had certainly never happened before. Franck showed him how two bullets had been superimposed on the previous ones, you just had to look and show a bit of good faith to see that, the target proved it, what was the point of making a fuss? Passers-by were beginning to gather, and Franck couldn’t understand why the stakes had suddenly risen. His mission and the need for discretion inhibited him slightly, but it was too late now to deprive the little girl of her trophy. He made sure she couldn’t see what was happening, discreetly grabbed the stall-keeper’s arm, twisted it behind his back, telling him to keep quiet, and stuck the muzzle of a rifle into his mouth. The man raised his arm in shocked surrender. A minute later the little girl grabbed her monkey in her arms, and at last gave in and smiled. Before letting her go, Franck could not resist running his hands through her long fine gold-speckled hair. Something told him she would never forget him.