Lemercier had vanished into the projection room, and the film had not started; people were becoming impatient.
“Back home we would have shot the projectionist by now,” Fred whispered.
Tom, despite having spent a lifetime waiting for things, rather agreed. Lemercier reappeared, his arms raised in despair, and climbed onto the stage to make an announcement.
“My friends! The film library has made a mistake. The reels I’ve been sent are the wrong ones. It’s not the first time it’s happened . . .”
It was true – it happened about twice every year. Last November, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had strayed into the boxes labelled 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Richard Fleischer, and a few months earlier, instead of an American documentary called Punishment Park, the club had had to make do with The Return of the Pink Panther. But it took more than this to unsettle Alain, who was able, with skilful juggling, to justify the change in the programme, and improvise a rough presentation, even finding connections between the films. This kind of recovery from mishap had become the master of ceremonies’ speciality. Quint looked at Fred with a relieved smile.
“No point staying here. We might as well go home.”
Alain apologized profusely to his guest, and suggested making a date for another showing, while Fred, disappointed not to be appearing on stage, headed for the exit without a word. Tom suggested they go and have a drink in the town.
“At least stay for the film,” Alain said. “It’s another American one, you won’t have wasted a trip.”
Fred followed Quintiliani. He would calm his nerves with a couple of glasses of bourbon, annoy Tom with his spiel about the good old days, and they would go back to the Rue des Favorites like the close neighbours that they were.
“Do stay,” Lemercier insisted. “I’m sure you’ll like the film, it’s Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, about the New York Mafia. You’ll see, it’s very funny and instructive.”
Fred suddenly froze, with one arm in his jacket sleeve. His face was expressionless.
As an officer in the FBI, Quintiliani had learned never to show surprise, and to face the unexpected coolly and methodically – he was the type of person who knew how to breathe with his stomach when the barrel of a .45 was suddenly pressed into the back of his neck. However, at this precise moment, and despite his usual aplomb in the face of new situations, he felt overcome by a simultaneous hot flush and an icy blast in his guts, and he broke into a sweat.
Fred betrayed himself with an evil smile.
“We’re not in any great hurry, Tom . . .”
“I think we’d better go. Anyway, you’ve seen that film. What’s the point of seeing it again?”
Like all mafiosi, Fred adored all the films in the Godfather series. They were the chronicles of their great history, they provided legitimacy, and enhanced their reputations in the eyes of the world. There was nothing the wise guys enjoyed more, when gathered together, than to recite lines of dialogue from the films to one another, even miming some of the scenes. Sometimes one of them would find himself alone in front of the screen, late at night, sobbing over the death of Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando. To them, all other Mafia films were totally ridiculous and full of inaccuracies, with their operetta killers and absurd costumes. Dozens of such inept films were made in America each year – they were anachronistic and grotesque, and deeply insulting for the members of the real families, who were not amused at seeing their image turned into caricature by Hollywood.
Until Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas came along.
Fred knew the film almost by heart, and he hated it for a thousand reasons. In it gangsters were reduced to what they really were: scum, whose only aim in life was to park in forbidden places, give the biggest fur coat to their wife and, above all, never to have to live the lives of those millions of idiots who get up each morning to earn a miserable crust, instead of sleeping late in a gold-plated bed. That was all a mafioso was, and Goodfellas told it like it was. Without the myth, all that was left was stupidity and cruelty. Giovanni Manzoni, Luca Cuozzo, Joe Franchini, Anthony De Biase, Anthony Parish and all the rest of the gang knew that henceforth their bad-boy aura had lost its shine for ever.
So why this film, this particular evening?
A coincidence? Just one more reversal? Another little episode to blame on human fallibility? Why not some other film, any film, from the thousands of possibilities? La règle du jeu? Lawrence of Arabia? La grande vadrouille? Bitches on Heat? The Blood of Frankenstein? Why Goodfellas, why this horribly accurate mirror-image of Fred’s life?
“I’d be delighted to see it again,” he said to Lemercier, as he returned to his seat. “I don’t know much about these gangster stories, but I’d be happy to try and answer a few questions during the discussion.”
The MC, happy to have saved the situation, went back to the projection room. Tom, feeling unusually angry, restrained an impulse to knock Fred to the ground. Fred savoured the anger like a fine liqueur; any opportunity to see Quint in such a state was a victory gained over his misfortunes. Fred now held in his hands a way of taking his own particular kind of revenge against a film that had deprived him of his image as an honourable bandit, and had branded him as nothing more than a stereotypical loser.
“Instead of getting cross, Tom, tell me if you’ve seen the film.”
Quintiliani was not a man who went in for leisure activities; he enjoyed neither fishing nor camping, and only took exercise in order to keep in shape. He spent his rare moments of leisure reading articles that were more or less relevant to his activities. The cinema? He had memories of drive-ins, where the film took second place to the girl on the back seat of the car, or films shown in breaks during his training, and, most of all, endless films of no interest watched on his many plane journeys. However, he had seen Goodfellas and all the other Mafia films, in the interests of research. He needed to know about the heroes of those he was tracking, to understand their language, and the in-jokes derived from the films.
“You really want to play this game?” he whispered in Fred’s ear.
Fred understood Tom perfectly, and interpreted the question as: You creep, Manzoni, if you play this trick on me, I’ll make your life such hell, you’ll wish you’d spent the rest of your life in jail.
“It’ll be a chance for you to ask me all the questions you’ve been wanting to ask all this time, and maybe today you’ll get some answers. Surely that makes it worth the journey?”
A suggestion that Tom read as: You can go fuck yourself, you fucking cop.
The lights went down, silence fell, and a white beam of light hit the screen.
*
Maggie parked the car in front of the house and waved at Vincent, who was smoking a cigarette at his window. As soon as she came into the living room she collapsed on the sofa with her eyes closed, still overcome by the sensation of having travelled through the looking glass. On her drive home, she had been unable to stop thinking of the room lent to the Newark branch of the Salvation Army, where every day tramps and homeless people would gather. Wooden tables and benches, and all those people sitting there for hours, battling against the winter cold, the boredom, the fear of the streets and, above all, hunger. She had looked through the filthy windows on occasions, at this goldfish bowl of misery, practically holding her nose just imagining the smell. She had several times wanted to go in to experience the dizzying sight of degradation, and what had stopped her was not fear of confronting such squalor, but the strange feeling that she was worse off than them in her own degradation. These filthy men and women had their own sort of dignity. Not her. By accepting the values and way of life of Giovanni Manzoni, she had renounced any kind of self-esteem. If the local hobos could have suspected that this fine lady in her fur coat felt that way, they would have been the ones to give her some charity.
*
When the credits had finished rolling, Lemercier came back onto the stage and took the microphone to make a few general
remarks about the film and its director. Before asking for comments from those who had something to say, he turned to Fred and invited him to join him. There was some encouraging applause and, as usual, Alain asked the first question.
“When you’re living in New York, are you aware of the presence of the Mafia, as shown in films?”
Tom, with a reflex gesture which betrayed his anxiety, reached for his holster.
“The presence of the Mafia?” Fred repeated.
He didn’t really understand the question. It was too abstract, it was like asking if he was aware of the sky above his head or the earth beneath his feet. He sat dumbly in front of the microphone, feeling ridiculous, and took refuge in silent thought.
The presence of the Mafia.
Alain interpreted his silence as shyness due to the language barrier, and came to his aid.
“Might one see guys in the street like those three gangsters in the film?”
With this question, Fred caught a glimpse of the immense chasm which separated him eternally from the rest of humanity, the part that remains on the right side of the law. Gangsters fascinated honest people, but only in the role of fairground monsters.
Quintiliani almost raised his hand to say something. Not to put an end to this charade, but to come to the poor fellow’s rescue. It was very well being clever alone on your veranda, telling your particular form of truth with an old typewriter, all very fine . . . But to speak for your life as a gangster on stage, holding a microphone, in front of fifty people – it was like going before the grand jury again. Fred was like a schoolboy, all excited about reciting his poem in public, who can’t even remember his own name once he’s up in front of the blackboard.
There were low mutterings in the audience, and a feeling of awkwardness. Alain tried to think of some quip to offer support. Might one see guys like that in the streets? How could one answer a question like that, which seemed so harmless, but was in fact so brutal? Faced with all the stares, Fred was tempted to lie, to claim that the criminals were invisible, and melted into the background like chameleons; he could even question their very existence, suggest that they were a scriptwriter’s invention, like zombies or vampires. And then he could have made his farewells and fled back to his veranda, swearing to himself that he would never re-emerge. But in the name of the very truth that he was trying to discover by writing his memoirs, he felt he did not have the right to run away.
“At the start of the film, in the first scene in the bar, there’s a guy who crosses the screen holding a glass, you don’t get told his name, he’s wearing a grey waistcoat over a yellow shirt with rolled-up sleeves. That man really existed, his name was Vinnie Caprese, he was a regular on Hester Street at a coffee shop called Caffe Trombetta. He would have a strong espresso there every morning, like he’d done since he was eight. His mother used to make one for him before he went off to school, no bread and butter, nothing else, and the kid would go off like that after gulping down his espresso – sometimes if it was very cold she’d put a drop of Marsala in it to warm his belly. I’ve always thought that that sort of thing is what makes people into executioners. Just details like that.”
*
Despite her exhaustion, Maggie couldn’t get to sleep. She picked up the phone and suggested an evening visit to the G-men, who welcomed this unexpected distraction. Di Cicco got out three glasses for the grappa Maggie brought with her. She went over to the binoculars mounted on the tripod and pointed them towards the apartments that were still lit. Without the slightest mocking voyeurism or ill will, Maggie was now in the habit of watching the neighbours several times a week under the intrigued gaze of the two federal agents. The sample of humanity in the Favorites district was now her private laboratory – spying was her new science. If Fred regarded humanity as a grey and distant entity, Maggie refused to believe in the apparent banality of her neighbours’ lives.
“What is it that amuses you in all this, Maggie?”
“Nothing amuses me, but everything interests me. When I was young, I used to spend my time putting people into categories, labelled with one function – one name was enough. Now the idea that everybody is in some way exceptional helps me to understand how the world works.”
She pointed her binoculars towards the little three-storey building at number 15, where four families and two single people lived.
“The Pradels are watching TV,” she said.
“She suffers from insomnia, it sometimes stays on till four or five,” Caputo said, sipping his drink.
“I wonder if he’s got a mistress,” she said.
“How did you guess, Maggie?”
“I can sense it.”
“She’s called Christine Laforgue, medical assistant, thirty-one years old.”
“Does the wife know?”
“She doesn’t suspect anything. Christine Laforgue and her husband came to dinner there the other night.”
“What a pig!”
This had been a frequent cri de coeur in the past, at the time when Giovanni and his acolytes had had “official” mistresses. They would parade them on their arms in selected places, to such a point that the wives would try and meet them in person, hoping to scratch out their eyes. Since then adultery had been very high on her list of deadly sins.
Maggie then looked up to the top flat, where there was no light.
“Has Patrick Roux gone out?”
“No. He set off on his tour of France yesterday,” Di Cicco replied.
Maggie, like an entomologist, observed the evolution of her subjects, and their interactions. Occasionally she intervened directly in order to precipitate some development in their lives.
Patrick Roux was fifty-one, divorced, and worked as a bursar in a private school. He had just taken an unpaid sabbatical in order to fulfil a long-held dream – to criss-cross the country on his beautiful 900cc motorbike. Knowing that bikers were much in demand for this purpose, Maggie had persuaded him to carry an organ-donor card in his wallet. Roux thought that this would bring him luck, and in any case he had no objection to the thought of his heart beating in another man’s body.
“I’ve got something here that might interest you, Maggie,” Caputo said. “It’s about the little old lady at number eleven, who looks as though she’d go straight to heaven, the one who lives with her daughter and son-in-law. Well, back in 1971, she poisoned an old neighbour’s dog. He never got over it and followed the animal soon after. It was a perfect crime.”
“And nobody ever knew?”
“She talked about it yesterday to a friend in Argentan. I suppose she wanted to confess to someone before facing her maker.”
God . . . Where had He got to? Maggie felt that by observing her neighbours so closely, she was doing the work that He should have been doing for his own creatures: watching over them and sometimes showing them the right way.
“Mr Vuillemin’s light is still on,” she said, surprised. “He’s supposed to be getting up in less than three hours. . . .”
This was the baker in the avenue de la Gare, who had lost half his business since the arrival of a young competitor. Like the others, Maggie had gone and bought a baguette from the new man, and had had the courage to give Mr Vuillemin her verdict in person: “His bread is much better.” How could this be possible? Nobody had ever complained about his bread for more than twenty years. It was no more or less spongy than any other, no whiter, it stayed fresh for the same length of time, so what was it? To find out, he had tasted it too. And looking at his dough, he wondered, with a sudden burst of nostalgia, where he had gone wrong along the way. And then he had decided to set to work and show this callow youth what he was made of.
Maggie couldn’t bear to miss a single detail of all these human stories unfolding every day outside her door.
*
“. . . Bill Clunan learned Italian in order to become a gangster. You can picture the type, both parents Irish – he studied books of Eyetie slang, ate every day at Spagho, practised swearing, even
Catholic that he was, that must have stuck in his gullet, having to blaspheme like the Italians, calling the Virgin Mary a whore, that was the hardest thing, but what can you do, he wanted to join Fat Willy’s gang rather than any Irish one. If you ever go to Brooklyn and you’re on Mellow Boulevard around seven, you might see him; he’s got long grey hair brushed back, Ray-Bans on his nose, he’ll be playing Scopa with his mates, who still call him Paddy.”
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.”