“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.
His concentration was broken by a figure coming up from the garden. Quintiliani had come round the back so as not to ring the bell. Fred prepared for the third sermon of the evening, after Ben’s and Maggie’s.
“One might have imagined, Manzoni, that the trial, the disgrace, the exile might have induced you to stop and think. Oh, I don’t mean the discovery of a conscience, or any kind of true repentance, I certainly didn’t expect that. Do you know why you’re still capable of committing crimes like this evening’s? Quite simply, it’s because you haven’t paid your dues. Twenty or thirty years in a six-yard-square cell might have given you the time to consider this question: was it all worth it?”
“You still believe in that crap? Paying one’s debt to society?”
“With the exception of three or four well-meaning politicians, a few sociologists and the odd big-hearted social worker, nobody gives a fuck whether prison makes any difference to a creep like you, Manzoni. The whole world needs to know that you’re behind bars
, because if scum like you get away with it, why should anyone bust a gut obeying laws designed to suppress all liberty and pleasure?”
“Me, in prison? I’d have had followers, lots of small guys who regarded me as a legend – I’d have given them a master class. I’d have done much more damage inside than out.”
“Well, from now on you’re grounded. None of you can leave the house until further notice.”
“The kids too?”
“Sort it out with them. After your antics last night, our arrangement may not work any more. You’ve been warned.”
“But . . . Hey, Quint!”
The FBI agent left, relieved, but with the bulk of his work still before him: he now had to divert all lines of enquiry about the sabotage of the Carteix factory. To do that, he had to have a free hand.
Fred decided to go up to bed, but he found the bedroom door locked. He didn’t insist, and instead went down to Malavita’s lair – there would be no recriminations from her, at any rate. The dog woke up, surprised by this late visit, and by the noise in the street that was reaching her through the window.
Fred turned on the tap to fill her bowl with fresh water. Fresh, crystal-clear water flowed out; he couldn’t resist tasting it.
He felt sure that at that same moment, throughout Cholong, dozens of people were doing exactly the same thing, and marvelling at the clearness of the water. Some of them were beginning to believe in miracles.
7
At the precise moment Benedetto D. Manzoni’s plane was taking off from Heathrow to fly to America, another, travelling in the opposite direction, was coming in to land at Roissy. Amongst the mostly American passengers were ten men from the state of New York, who hadn’t checked in any luggage. They all knew each other, but neither spoke nor nodded to one another. Six were of Italian origin, two Irish, and two were Puerto Ricans born in Miami. None had ever set foot in Europe. At first sight, one might have taken them for a group of lawyers come to deal with some international legal business, perhaps on behalf of some powerful multinational’s global interests. In fact they were soldiers – the kind of soldiers who prefer first-class cabins to strike helicopters, and Armani suits to jungle fatigues. This was a death squad, selected in the same way as mercenaries – which is what they were.
*
Some of the Blakes regarded the curfew as a blessing, while for others it was the most unfair of punishments. Fred had already decided not to go out in order to avoid the festivities and carry on with his masterpiece. It was a point of honour to him never to be affected by sanctions. In fact the threat of punishment rarely had the desired effect on gangsters: far from scaring them, it gave them an opportunity to defy the authorities and make them look ridiculous. They would insult a judge in court, spit in a federal agent’s face during an interrogation, pour scorn on prison guards; they would never miss an opportunity to be provocative, and they would never bow down their heads. So Quint had consigned Fred to quarters? What a blessing. He would be able to devote himself entirely to chapter six, which began:
In films, people like to see violence put to the service of the just, but it’s because they like violence, not because they like justice. Why do people like stories of revenge rather than forgiveness? Because men love the idea of punishment. To see the righteous hitting back, and hitting hard – that’s something people never tire of and don’t feel guilty about. It’s the only sort of violence that’s ever scared me.
On the floor above, Belle had shut herself up, to get out of sight of her family. She had been prevented from taking a role in the end-of-term show, now she wasn’t allowed to go out into the town and have fun with people of her age. All she could do now was disappear into her room to try to make some sense of all this sacrifice. If she wasn’t allowed to appear, she would disappear, and this time for good. She had just taken an irrevocable decision.
As for Warren, he was furious at having to pay over and over again for his father’s actions. The approach of the festivities had awoken the child in him, and the punishment made him regret once more that he wasn’t yet an adult. He was being punished as if he was an adult, why shouldn’t he have adult status? He shut himself in his room and spent long hours in front of his screen, picking up information from the Internet that would come in useful for the future he was preparing for himself. What was his plan? It was to turn back the clock, and remake history; he would change everything, and start again from scratch.
Of the four, Maggie was the most inconvenienced by the curfew. She was committed a hundred times over to helping put up and run stands at the fair, and ensure its smooth running; she would have enjoyed nothing more than making her contribution to such a popular event. She sat slumped on the sofa in front of the television, not watching it, totally discouraged and suffering from doubt. Well might she devote herself body and soul to others, she would always be dragged down in the end by Fred, and forced back into the role of Mafia wife, and what’s more a discredited Mafia wife, shunned by all. For every step she made, Fred pulled her ten steps back, and as long as she remained with that creep, despite anything she might still feel for him, she would never escape from this downward spiral. She would have to talk to the one person who, after all, looked after her better than Fred ever could.
*
The town of Cholong-sur-Avre was wearing its party colours. At ten, the parents had turned up at the school hall for the concert, which had gone off without the slightest hitch – a total success and a happy moment for old and young alike. At two, the fairground people opened the fair, starting up their rides for the young people, the first of whom started to pour into the Place de la Libération. The shortest night of the year would go by in a flash, the young wouldn’t go to bed at all, and the less young would go to bed to the sound of fairground music. Summer had started with a bang.
Thirty-five miles away, at the Madeleine de Nonancourt roundabout, a grey Volkswagen minibus stopped to check the route. The driver, irritated by having been made to take a wrong turning outside Evreux, was encouraging his pilot to concentrate. The ten men in the back were bored stiff, staring out at a landscape that was a great deal less exotic than they had expected. The grass was green just like anywhere else, the trees were less shady than the planes in New York, and the sky seemed grey and dirty compared to the one in Miami. They had all heard of Normandy from war films, without, however, ever having felt the slightest curiosity about the place and its history. The fact was, they hadn’t been curious about anything since landing at Roissy, not the climate, not the cuisine; they didn’t even care about the discomfort and the travel – they only had one thought, which was how they would spend the two million dollars they would each receive when the mission was accomplished.
Six of them already imagined themselves retiring from business; at thirty or forty, they were most likely living through their very last working day. They would buy a farm, a villa with a pool, a room all the year round in Las Vegas, anything would be possible. The four others certainly didn’t scorn the reward, but they were driven by another motive. They had lost brothers or fathers thanks to Manzoni’s testimony, and killing him had become an obsession for them. The most motivated of all was called Matt Gallone, Don Mimino’s grandson and direct heir. For the six years since the trial, Matt had concentrated exclusively on avenging his grandfather. Manzoni had dispossessed him of his kingdom, of his future title of Godfather and status as demi-god. Every moment of Matt’s life, every gesture was aimed at the death of Manzoni. Manzoni’s death lurked behind laughter with friends, behind kisses on his children’s foreheads. It was Matt’s Via Dolorosa and for him it would be the path to freedom and rebirth.
“Follow signs to Rouen,” said the pilot, his nose buried in the map.
The whole operation had been planned in New York by Matt and the capi of the five families, who, on this occasion, were operating as a single family. Failing any direct contacts in France, the death squad had had to organize itself via Sicily. Orders had been sent to Catania
, where a local Cosa Nostra contact had arranged the logistics through one of their companies, based in Paris. The arrangements included meeting the ten men at Roissy, arranging transport and providing arms: fifteen automatic pistols and ten revolvers, six assault rifles, twenty hand grenades and a rocket-launcher. They had also been allocated a driver and an interpreter, a fellow who had previously taken part in a commando operation. Then it would be over to Matt and his men. In order to maintain team spirit during the operation and to avoid unhealthy competition, the famous twenty-million-dollar reward would be divided equally; the one who actually killed Gianni Manzoni would only receive an honorary bonus. In a few hours, he would be a millionaire and a living legend. The world would admire his actions, because the world despises a traitor. For what could be worse than to sell your own brother? The last circle of hell was reserved for such people. Today, 21st June, just one of these ten would be the chosen one and would gain an everlasting place in the criminals’ roll of honour. He would be written about in books long after his death.
*
Beauty had been condemned to solitude. Belle could imagine no worse fate than her own. How can you prevent a star from shining? How can you deprive the world of this gift from God? This knowledge became harder and harder to bear as she approached womanhood. She decided finally that the only thing comparable in power to her beauty was the wickedness of those who prevented her from making use of it. It was as though God himself had created such perfection with the sole purpose of depriving people of it. It was just like God to be so inhuman: to demand that you should sacrifice what you held most dear; to create temptation and sin simultaneously; to forgive the sinners and punish the good. Belle felt somehow a victim of His mysterious plan without understanding what on earth He could possibly be up to.