The Four Corners of Palermo (2 page)

“I only try things from boys I know. And I don’t know you,” said Rosalba.

“Pleasure to meet you; my name is Marinello Spataro, I’m twenty-two. I’d like to become your friend.”

She sensed that his dark eyes spoke some undefinable truth, but she couldn’t pin down just what truth that might be. His singsong Palermitan accent was clearly from the poorer part of town, but it was elevated by a denim shirt with flap pockets and mother-of-pearl snaps, worn untucked over a pair of white pants.

“My name is Rosalba Corona; I’m seventeen years old. I want to be a teacher.”

She said it unhesitatingly, as if staking out her territory: I’m studying, I have a future; I’m not just some chick you might pick up in a bar.

“It’s nice to meet you, Rosalba. But don’t tell me you want to start teaching tonight?”

She smiled. He took her hand, as if to shake it, but instead he caressed it. He felt the girl’s skin as she, instead of looking elsewhere if only to simulate shyness, looked him straight in the eye. Phoenician eyes met pitch-black eyes.

The speakers blared out the voice of Giuni Russo, singing that summer’s hit “Un’estate al mare.”

Some of the young people around the bar were singing the song and swiveling their hips; a young blonde woman dressed like a Sperlari mint candy was hoping someone would invite her to dance, if only for the sugar rush.

Marinello and Rosalba were deafened by the noise thundering out of their hearts. The kind of thing that happens in romantic fiction, not in crime novels.

She didn’t start teaching that night, but three nights later, after thinking it over carefully, she decided that she had fallen head over heels in love with Marinello, as she had already suspected the instant his hand first brushed hers, over a Fanta at the bar.

Everyone lived together. Good people and bad. Victims and killers. Daughters of respectable civil servants and sons of bloodthirsty Mafiosi. A borderline had never been drawn, in Palermo. Before he was murdered, the prefect of Palermo, Carlo Alberto
Dalla Chiesa, said in one of his very rare interviews that he never accepted dinner invitations: in Palermo you never know whom you’re shaking hands with. We all went to Mondello, to Addaura. We all frequented the same bars
.

That summer, a close friend knocked on my door; he was distraught
.

“What happened?”

“I just saw Michele Greco,” he replied in a whisper, flopping onto my sofa
.

He’d gone out for a granita in a café on Via Libertà, one of the best-known cafés in the city. Michele Greco, also known as Il Papa, “the Pope,” a fugitive from the law and the unquestioned capo of the family that ran Croceverde Giardini and, therefore, of the Palermo Mafia, was spending his afternoon like any other retiree, seated at a table in a bar, savoring a pastry and an iced espresso
.

“I ran away terrified.” It never even occurred to him to call the police
.

There was promiscuity, mixing freely and with impunity. Very few were trying to hunt down the mob bosses: in many departments and agencies of the Italian state, it emerged years later, Cosa Nostra informants had burrowed deep
.

I spent the afternoon at the hall of justice, in search of magistrates who knew me and would be willing to reply to my
buon giorno
in public. Later, in private, we’d talk about the shoot-out between two Spataro cousins and what possible motive might be behind it.

I didn’t pick up much information. Around seven I went back home, to an apartment in a building dating from the turn
of the twentieth century, a place I shared with my best friend, Fabrizio. Sandalwood boiserie paneling on the walls gave it a very Gotham City look and feel. Fabrizio’s grandparents had both died there, more than fifty years after building the place, and in the early 1980s, with the apartment unoccupied, the two of us were allowed to live in it. We touched nothing, not the sandalwood, not the Art Nouveau furniture. We added our LPs, our hi-fi systems, our paintings, and the bohemian lifestyles of a couple of guys in their twenties without any clear objectives.

I woke up early every day to go to the newspaper, which had to be put to bed at the printers no later than 1:00 in the afternoon. My alarm clock rang at 6:30, and I usually made it in by 7:15, with a wave and a “good morning” to Saro, the newspaper office’s doorman. “Sleepy eyes,” he’d say with a smile, twirling his mustache to launch an unmistakable allusion into the air, affectionately: “Sexy eyes, sexy eyes.”

Palermo was still enveloped in the gentle warmth of early summer: in a few days, the vise grip of summer heat would tighten. You could die from the heat and the stench of garbage. But in the same city that appeared bent on killing you, you could also live in what seemed like paradise. And it was one of those evenings.

Paradise was what Paolo had promised me: “I’ll take you to Mondello for a drink, at the Bar La Torre. There are four girls from northern Italy, just passing through. Each of them prettier than the last. They’re here to do a photo shoot, for an ad.”

Paolo was one of my closest and most valued friends. He studied philosophy without much drive, but he did distinguish himself for his remarkable speculative abilities: he was
the first in Palermo to explore successfully what he called the “phenomenology of windsurfing.” With an appendix that he planned to present as his supplemental thesis:
On Windsurfing: A Theoretical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Pick-Up Artistry
. We had a date for ten that night at the Hotel La Torre—back then, as far as I was concerned, one of the finest hotels on earth. A hundred or so rooms on the point of the Gulf of Mondello, with the surf crashing beneath every single window. Mount Pellegrino, looming above the beach, is something straight out of a German landscape painting from the late nineteenth century. Seen from there, Palermo is the standard, classical illusion that, over the centuries, fooled thousands of travelers who passed through on the Grand Tour. A place of exemplary beauty. “Exemplary”: an adjective used, in obituaries, to describe fathers and husbands guilty of countless faults and sins.

At ten o’clock, I parked my Vespa 125 GTR in front of the hotel. Paolo was already at the bar, surrounded by the four girls. There was also a tall guy, introduced as the photographer who was doing the advertising shoot. A guy who was too tall for any of us to know what was flickering inside his eyes. No one born in Sicily was tall enough to exchange a glance with him on a horizontal plane.

The girls were called Marta, Francesca, Benedicta, and Filomena: they all looked out of place in a city that had nothing of the advertising photo studio about it. We talked, we drank. The photographer left early, taking Benedicta with him—she looked like Queen Soraya of Iran, only younger, and was as eager to leave as he was to take her.

The five of us remained at the bar with a bottle of Passito di Pantelleria. The topics of conversation: love, the future, our hopes and dreams. Marta wanted to marry a soccer star. Filomena was engaged to be married to a textiles entrepreneur, and in fact the photographer was working on an advertising campaign for her fiancé’s company. Francesca had nothing to say. She nursed her
passito
as if she wanted to make that glass last for a couple of years. Every time she set her glass down, our eyes met, in part because I wasn’t looking at anything but her eyes. Limpid, as green as a piece of Martorana marzipan fruit. “What about you, Francesca?”

“What do you mean, what about me?”

“Are you in love with someone?”

“I don’t like to talk about my private life.”

“Did you know that ‘private’ means something that’s missing, something of which you’ve been deprived? For instance: that person has been
deprived
of his liberty. That nation has been
deprived
of the right to a democratic ballot …”

She smiled.

“I haven’t been
deprived
of anything. I have a boyfriend, in Milan. He’s a lawyer. I read a book once where it said that lawyers use words as weapons. It made me think.”

“What about us journalists, in your opinion? How do we use words?”

“As traps. You talk, you choose your words. Then other people believe them.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Anything but a lawyer,” she said with a smile. She was charming.

“How many days are you staying?”

“We have a flight tomorrow afternoon.”

I forgot about my day at the hall of justice, and to make up for it I resented the injustice of her departure. We left, exchanging phone numbers.

By one o’clock I was back home. There was an orange tabby cat who lived with me and Fabrizio. It was a male cat named Cicova. He came toward me with his tail held high: Cicova was hungry. It didn’t take much to make him happy.

Before going to bed I reviewed the day’s activities. I’d met Francesca, I’d been told about an unlikely shoot-out between two Mafiosi in the same clan, and I’d found out nothing specific, except for one fact with which I was already very familiar: all Milan phone numbers start with 02.

Marinello had woken up; the lowered roller blinds made it impossible for him to guess what time of day it was.

“My love, is it already afternoon?”

Rosalba was sitting in the chair next to the bed. She touched his forehead. The shot that the Professore had given him had worked: his brow was cool. The dressing on his leg was stained red; the wound was draining.

“It’s six o’clock. The Professore helped you to get some sleep. He says it isn’t serious; we can get out of here whenever you want. After all, I’ll be doing the driving.”

Marinello closed his eyes and thought back to the moment when he had felt the bullet tear into his thigh. Totuccio was about fifty feet away; they’d fired at each other, unloading two clips, missing each other entirely. The fury of finally lashing out against someone. Their aim was off, but then: a
direct hit. A lead projectile had lacerated everything in its way: blood vessels, muscles, nerves, connective tissues, veins, arteries. Everything torn to shreds, in an area no bigger than a hundred-lire coin; but painful, as if each of these lire were billions. A bullet in the thigh: nothing for a guy like him, but it was everything for a nephew fleeing a Mafia family with only one thing in mind—to escape with the right girl, a girl who was different from all the rest, to a place where no one knew how to speak Sicilian dialect.

“I’m no killer.”

He’d thought of Rosalba, hidden in the car.

And he saw his cousin Totuccio coming toward him to finish him off.