The Four Corners of Palermo (7 page)

Mariapia adjusted her skirt, which tended to hike up on the upholstery of the car’s seat, and smiled at her husband.

“It’s nice to think aloud,” she said, tenderly.

Neither of them noticed the Alfetta that had been following them for a couple of minutes now.

At the end of Viale Lazio, where the big thoroughfare merges into the ring road around Palermo, a motorcycle with two men on board, both wearing full-face helmets, pulled out of a cross street and swerved ahead of the Fiat 126.

It all happened in a flash.

The motorcyclist slammed on his brakes; Arcangelo jammed his right foot onto the brake pedal; Mariapia lurched forward out of her seat and dropped her shopping bags, which fell between her feet. A large, dark automobile loomed up instantly beside them. The guy riding shotgun on the motorcycle dismounted with a gun in his hand. A third man got out of the car.

Arcangelo and Mariapia both felt a powerful burning sensation in their hands, their chests, their legs, their heads. Then they felt nothing. Their bodies were now dead meat, bathed in the gushing blood that poured out of the holes punched in them by the .357 Magnums.

A bus driver on a route heading in the opposite direction down Viale Lazio saw the muzzle flashes, heard the racket of gunfire, but decided to continue on his way to the next bus stop. Two other cars didn’t even bother to slow down.

Totuccio climbed back aboard the Alfetta. The other killer climbed onto the backseat of the Honda. They peeled out, heading toward the Bellolampo dump: another car and another motorcycle to burn to charred skeletons. Message delivered.

There was a shrill note of alarm in the news editor’s voice. His words came across the line like a police siren rising and falling.

“Get going, as fast as you can. Viale Lazio. Double homicide. No other details available. They say it’s something big.”

With the receiver braced between my shoulder and neck, I looked over at Francesca. She was standing there, in front of me, in a miniskirt that was tearing me apart.

“Right, boss. I’m on my way.”

I hung up.

“Francesca, forgive me, something’s come up at the office. I ought to go take a look at it; do you mind very much if we swing by on our way to dinner, to check out the story my boss told me about?”

“You already told him you were going. Were you planning to leave me here on my own again?”

She didn’t sound angry; her voice was simply flat, matter-of-fact: I was starting to understand that this was just how she talked.

“No, I’d like you to come with me, that way, afterward …”

She didn’t let me finish my sentence.

“That way, afterward, nothing. But I’m coming with you. Let’s see what your job is like.”

In order to climb onto the Vespa behind me, she was forced to hike her already skimpy miniskirt even higher. I silently wished I could be a pedestrian watching us go by.

We headed for Viale Lazio. We didn’t have far to go.

Already midway up that broad thoroughfare, flashing blue squad-car lights and a small, tangled column of cars pointed to the scene of the murder. A policeman stopped us.

“I’m from the newspaper.”

“Does the
signorina
work for the paper, too?”

“No, she’s my fiancée: she’s just along for the ride.”

Francesca sank a sharp fingernail into my ribs.

“All right, you can go on through.”

We got off the Vespa a dozen yards from the Fiat 126. I saw the camera flashes of the forensics team illuminating the scene. Two figures, sprawled back in the seats of the car. Blood everywhere. An official I knew responded to my greeting, with a quick glance at Francesca.

“Nasty story.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“We’re still identifying them. We took IDs from his wallet and her handbag. At headquarters they’re running down the license plates on the Fiat 126.”

I took another five steps or so, and Francesca took my hand.

Seen from the outside, we were a couple admiring not a beautiful sunset, but a couple of corpses.

Francesca turned to look at me, her eyes glistening.

“I’ve never seen a dead person before,” she whispered.

Half the man’s face had been blown away by the pointblank pistol fire. The woman was huddled over. A small mass of humanity, red with blood.

“If you prefer, you can just wait for me in the bar across the road, there.”

She didn’t answer; she just gripped my hand even harder. I didn’t insist. Among the cops hard at work I noticed Salvo, my friend from the Squadra Catturandi. I dragged Francesca along with me and went over to him.

“Who are these two? Why a woman, too?”

“I told you. Nasty story, what happened in Piazza Scaffa. These are the girl’s parents: Signore and Signora Corona, Arcangelo and Mariapia. Shot down like dogs, just to send a message to Marinello that love isn’t everything.”

A few days earlier, I’d read a line in a novel and I’d found it annoying. The main character, a detestable woman, said: “Oh my God, love is so overrated.” She would have gotten along famously with the Spataro family, I decided.

“
Grazie
, Salvo.”

Francesca had let go of my hand. She was standing next to me, stock still. Milan/Palermo, fashion/Mafia, life/death. When she’d landed at Punta Raisi, a few hours earlier, I had hoped there might be a love affair between the two of us, or even just a friendship sealed by a few days of free-and-easy sex. Instead, I had a young woman standing next to me who was being forced to grow up in a single evening, prisoner of a nightmare she could never have imagined in her life up north in Milan.

“I …” She took my hand again.

A police officer almost knocked her over. He was pushing through, making way for the team from the medical examiner’s office who had come to remove the corpses.

“I don’t know if this is what you could actually call living.”

“No, Francesca, it isn’t. Not for you. It is for us, we don’t have anything else. Go out to have dinner, make a stop on the way to look at a couple of murder victims, sit down in the restaurant, order an
arrosto panato
, laugh over your meal, joke about it, do your best to forget.”

She threw her arms around me, in the midst of all those cops, sirens wailing in the distance, stretcher bearers, photographers, television cameras the size of steamer trunks, assistant cameramen with floodlights in one hand, television reporters, and garbage. I felt her heart racing; I kissed her hair. I pulled her away from there, toward my Vespa, telling her it would be better for us to get dinner somewhere in the historic city center, instead of at home. We distributed the weight of death over the array of Norman-Arab beauty that I had promised her.
Beauty is stronger than death
:
Yasunari Kawabata. One of the few deities I recognized at the time.

Francesca left four days later. We made love for the first time the night they murdered the Coronas. Afterward, she wept: her lawyer hadn’t prepared her for such a powerful distillate of emotions. In the days that followed, it seemed to me that I’d used a murder to seduce a girl: not an enjoyable sensation.

We said goodbye with a kiss, in the lobby of Punta Raisi Airport. It was 1982. Each of us wanted to leave the other with a trace of love, and a kiss, when it comes to that, is worth more than any other bequest.

I can’t remember the names of all the women I slept with in those years, but I do remember how my lips and Francesca’s lingered, refusing to let each other go, how it felt as if we belonged together as an Alitalia flight attendant, with a pillbox hat on her head and a maxi skirt, was saying: “Boarding passes, please.”

Milan, January 2002. Headline: “Drug Smuggling: Sicilian mob boss arrested, fugitive from the law was hiding in Spain.” Body text: “Marinello Spataro, 45, member of the Ciaculli clan, was arrested yesterday by Spanish police on charges of international narcotics trafficking. He was taken into custody at the port of Almeria aboard a ship on which he had concealed 50kg of hashish, smuggled out of Morocco. The man admitted his real identity immediately. The Spanish authorities also served him with a warrant for aggravated charges of armed robbery, issued 18 years ago by the Palermo magistracy. According to the Italian police,
Spataro is the only member of the Ciaculli (province of Palermo) family of that name not facing charges of Mafia involvement or murder. Marinello Spataro asked the Spanish investigators to allow him to receive visits in prison from his wife, Rosalba, who lives in Malaga, and his two children, Arcangelo and Mariapia.”

I feel a shiver go down my back. One of the collateral effects of memory. I think back to that Fiat 126. To my friend Salvo, later murdered in a Palermo bar by a Corleone death squad of professional killers. To the two kids out front of Bar Crystal who talked to me about Rosalba. And then I think back to me and Francesca, embracing at the airport; love lost in an age of injustice
.

I fold up the sheet of paper with the story about Marinello and I call my deputy editor: “Antonio, would you please see that a brief item appears concerning this arrest in Spain; put it in the national news section. Maybe someone will still remember him.”

I’d like to be able to put everything back where it belongs, shut the cabinets and the armoires after placing every memory on the correct shelf. I know I won’t be able to do it
.

I find a photo of her in my hands; I haven’t looked at it since the early eighties. She slipped it out of her portfolio and gave it to me, without telling me when and where it had been taken. I never did find out. Now I can only guess, from certain details, that it was a French fashion shoot from the period. She wears a shirt dress in a soft black-and-white fabric, with a giant houndstooth check, and she’s wrapping the skirt around her as if in a gesture of self-protection, her left shoulder higher than her right, her head angled back, almost as if she were a waif, surprised in front of an Yves Saint Laurent boutique, just waiting to be rescued. Her face is enchanting, her eyes wide open, staring into the future, blue-green or perhaps blue-gray, some version of hazel, immense eyes defined by long eyelashes, eloquent eyelashes that tell a story with every glance. Her hair is a coppery blonde, almost red, even though in my memories she is an absolute blonde, a paragon, with her short, wavy hair, of Sandro Veronesi’s “blondeness.”

Her photograph forces me to go back in time. I think about the twenty-seven years since then, the path that each of us has taken, the disappointments that stubbornly, incessantly, do their best to act as a counterweight to our illusions
.

In that long-ago summer of 1983, we lived on illusions. Then I gave her, innocent creature that she was, one of her biggest disappointments, something I’m trying to come to terms with now, and for the first time
.

If life were a trial, the story that follows would be a summation uttered by a desperate counsel for the defense
.

There’s a victim; there’s a killer. And there was no justice
.

A spongy object the size of a small apple. It lay there before me, on the asphalt, amid smoking wreckage, rubble, stones. I leaned over and looked closer: it was a heel. Part of a foot, detached and skinned by the explosion. I recognized the structure of the bone. I had a retching urge to vomit. All around me were loud noises, the sirens of the police and Carabinieri squad cars that kept racing up, the irritable movements of men who, faced with an unforeseeable event, had no idea of where to go, what to say. Officers shouting orders that no one obeyed; I could see their mouths open wide but I heard nothing, not the sirens, not the shouts: it was as if someone had hit a mute button. Only video. And in the video I was standing there, motionless, looking down at that heel. I was wearing a pair of faded red jeans and a white shirt, a pair of Adidas amid the detritus covering the road. I looked to my left. Just a few yards away I saw the corpse to which that heel belonged. It lay in disarray on the sidewalk, stained with many colors: the vermillion of blood, the white of plaster, the gray of the metal fragments peppering the flesh. It could have been a young officer on security detail, or it could have been the concierge of the building. The face was unrecognizable; the identity would be established later. There was no reason for haste. Death had taken its time, and we were wandering aimlessly in horror.