“What about my best friend, Barbara, the one who had the boutique, what happened to her?”
“Barbara? Was she the one with the boobs always hanging out?”
“No, that’s Amy. Barbara’s the tall, thin one, who’s always laughing.”
“She got a divorce after the trial. The boutique was bought by a doughnut-seller. Last I heard, she was living with a beer salesman who treats her like shit.”
The boutique had been given to her by one of Gianni’s sidekicks, introduced to her by Maggie. The two young women had been inseparable, living through those golden years in an atmosphere of soft decadence that seemed as though it would go on for ever. Even before the betrayal, Maggie had sometimes felt dizzy with it all. Gianni Manzoni’s wife – she was the First Lady of the whole area. She never had to reserve a table, and had elevated shopping to a new art form; always driven everywhere, her smallest whims were commands. Paradoxically, these women spent their time criticizing their husbands, while always respecting the hierarchy and most of the codes of conduct. If a member of the family was in disgrace, his wife or girlfriend would distance herself from her friends until the quarantine period was over. But how could one live permanently outside the clan? All those evenings amongst friends, the weekends in Atlantic City, the holidays in Miami, the intricately linked family connections. From one day to the next, love, friendship and respect had been transformed into horror and then pure hatred towards Gianni and Livia.
Rather than ponder the sad fate of her childhood friend, Maggie took a swig of Chianti. The arrival of the children back from school created an opportune diversion.
“D!” Warren shouted, jumping into his cousin’s arms.
“You remember me? You were smaller than that stool!”
“His memory sometimes scares me,” Maggie said. “He even remembers the day when he was bouncing on a bench and fell onto a tray of empty glasses, and his cousin Ben took the bits of glass out of his stomach one by one, while they were waiting for the ambulance.”
“How could I forget that?” Warren said.
“You were hardly three years old,” Ben added. “It was at Paulie and Linnet’s wedding.”
That wedding had been one of their happiest memories, before becoming one of the worst, after Gianni’s evidence had sent Paulie to prison for seventeen years without parole. Linnet took to drink after that.
“I thought I could smell polenta,” said Belle as she came into the kitchen. “I’d know that smell anywhere.”
“Belle? Is that you, Belle?” Ben was struck dumb at the sight of his cousin.
He took her hands, held her arms wide in order to stare at her from top to toe, and then hugged her very gently, as though he was afraid of damaging her.
“The French probably don’t realize how lucky they are to have you. I remember when your dad used to take you to the Beccegato restaurant. You would come into the big room and everybody would go quiet, it always happened. And us, ten great big idiots around the table, we’d try and behave properly in front of a little girl of eight.”
Downstairs in the laundry room, Fred put a bowl of fresh water in front of the still-sleepy dog.
“What do dogs dream about?” he asked, stroking her.
Malavita emerged from her blanket to drink, and then lay on her back to let her master stroke her stomach. Fred gazed tenderly at her, thinking that she probably slept so much out of homesickness. The dog was probably dreaming of her homeland, the Australian bush, the birthplace of her race, of the arid land and icy nights, where her grandmothers and great-grandmothers herded and guarded the sheep. Malavita still had the physique for that way of life, all muscle and tendon, with a hard chest, short grey-black hair, and sharp upright ears ready to catch the smallest sound. How could one not take refuge in sleep, when, unable to make use of natural instincts, one is so alienated from one’s surroundings? Fred empathized with this suffering, and would not have wished it on anyone, even a dog. He was the only one who could imagine how useless and constrained Malavita must feel, removed to the Normandy bocage, which she refused even to explore. Fred was with her all the way, how could you blame her? He knelt down to kiss her on the nose. She let him do it, not moving. He turned out the light and went up to join the others.
“All I remember is your polenta with crayfish,” Belle said, dipping a piece of bread into the sauce. “Anyway, why does polenta always have to be accompanied by elaborate sauces? Shellfish, liver sausage, sparrows . . .”
“Sparrows? What do you mean?” Warren said.
“Your sister’s right,” said Ben. “Polenta doesn’t have much taste on its own, so it needs a strong sauce, you need to be inventive. In my time I did shoot sparrows in the garden with my shotgun, and then I cooked them. Belle found out and burst into tears.”
“You made my daughter cry, you bastard?” said Fred, now joining the conversation. “When are we going to eat?”
Ben served his polenta according to the old family ritual. It was regarded as a reconciliation dish, a seal of family unity. And it was treated with such solemnity because it was eaten off a scifa, a long rectangular wooden platter, into which everybody dipped their spoon. Ben, with a few skilful movements, poured the polenta along the length of the scifa before it could solidify, making ditches in which to pour the sauce, with the crayfish in the middle, and the game could begin. Each guest took his share with his spoon, digging a line to get to the crayfish; the greediest went first. Belle and Warren, who weren’t that interested in maize flour, or even shellfish, loved the whole polenta ritual, unaware though they were that for the gangsters of New York it had a whole symbolic meaning. When a war between families was threatened, with impending bloodshed, time would always be found to discuss the matter around a scifa, during which each participant would dig out his share without encroaching on his neighbour. It was an elegant way of marking territory and signing a non-intervention pact. Everybody was careful not to reach the crayfish too early or too late, and to share it out fairly, as if it were booty. There was no need to exchange a single word, even less to make any plans, everything was unspoken and understood – all had given their word just by sharing the meal.
Fred, filled with thoughts of the past, stuck his spoon in like the others, but without the slightest appetite.
*
Belle and Warren, excited by the presence of their American cousin, stayed up late, until Maggie intervened, and then, finally, Fred. The three of them drank some home-made limoncello, which animated the conversation until late in the evening. They avoided the painful subject – the trial and its never-ending repercussions – and just talked about their everyday life, down to the last detail, illustrated with anecdotes, but never giving way to nostalgia, which might have cast a shadow over the reunion. And then suddenly, looking at the time, Fred suggested to Ben that they go and “listen to the frogs partying.”
“What?”
“Your uncle,” Maggie said, “has found a great big muddy lake, six miles from here, where you can hear an amazing sound of frogs and toads croaking and wailing and squawking – it’s an incredible racket.”
“It’s an orgy, I tell you, what else could it be at this time of night?”
“Can you go out whenever you like?” Ben asked, pointing at the Feds’ house over his shoulder.
“You’re joking! They’re there twenty-four hours a day. Their light’s on all night. One sleeps while the other watches TV or complains to his wife about me, as if I’d forced them to come.”
“They certainly won’t let you go out tonight, they’re furious about Ben coming.”
Fred had been waiting for this; he went over to his wife and put his arms round her, nuzzling her neck, telling her she was the love of his life.
“I hope you don’t think I’m going to do what I think you want me to do . . .”
“Please, Maggie . . .”
“
Fuck off.”
“I need to be alone with my nephew,” he begged in French. “Do your thing with the delicious momma’s cooking and the olive oil, for once you’d be doing me a favour.”
Ben left them on their own.
“Ever since we’ve been in France, I haven’t been able to talk about the old business with anyone. Ben’s going to tell me what happened after we left, what the FBI won’t tell. And he won’t say anything in front of you, Livia.”
“Go and talk on the veranda, or in the laundry room.”
“I feel I’m being spied on all the time by those two idiots opposite; I sometimes even think they’ve got the place bugged.”
Fred led her over to the fridge, still talking.
“You know how to talk to them, you’ve got them eating out of your hand. The worse they think I am, the more they like you, you’re the only woman looking after them on this whole continent.”
Despite her husband’s bad faith, Maggie felt herself weakening at the thought of the two lonely, isolated agents, cut off from everything thanks to the Manzonis.
“You can get rid of all these leftovers, the aubergines in balsamic vinegar, this end of Parmesan, the sfogliatelle which are falling to bits, and the remains of the polenta. You never eat it twice in one week, it’s the rule.”
“When I was twenty and in love with you, you could have fooled me with all this crap. Why should I be taken in now?”
“We’ll only be gone an hour.”
If anyone had asked, Maggie would have replied that she hadn’t loved her husband for a long time now. She might have added that she often imagined living alone. All the same, she couldn’t quite explain how he still managed to amuse her so much, any more than she could explain the curious way she missed him when he was out of the house.
And so, basket in hand, she crossed the road, waving to Caputo, while Fred and Ben climbed over the wall, using the propane tank, and jumped down into the weed-strewn path which separated them from their neighbour. They found Ben’s car, and Fred pushed it freewheeling as far as the intersection of the Rue des Favorites and the avenue Jean-de-Saumur. Two minutes later, they were driving along the edge of the moonlit forest.
Fred had been champing impatiently at the bit, waiting for a moment alone with Ben, so that he could submit him to a proper interrogation. What had become of all his friends and family, colleagues, neighbours, cousins and all the others? He claimed again that he couldn’t trust the biased accounts he got from the FBI, and he asked for news of those he missed the most, and that included his mistresses. The answers were unambiguous: time had healed nothing. On the contrary, it had taken time for the Mob to lick its wounds, and its rage was that of a wounded animal. The government, by getting a big shot like Giovanni Manzoni to testify, had succeeded in cracking open the Cosa Nostra, encouraging others to sing as well and buy themselves a new life. And as long as Giovanni Manzoni remained alive, the temptation would be there. One or two more trials on that scale, and the Sicilian gangrene would itself die of gangrene.
“Stop here, we’ll walk the rest of the way.”
Ben parked the car next to a ditch, got the rucksack out of the boot, and followed his uncle, cutting across the fields, until they reached the Carteix factory, just visible through the darkness. With enormous care, Ben emptied the contents of the rucksack beside the entrance to the delivery car park; thirty sticks of dynamite lay on the ground like a game of pick-a-stick.
“You don’t do things by halves,” said Fred.
“It was from your description – you made it sound like General Motors.”
Ben had tried everything in his day – TNT, plastic, Selpex, all the nitroglycerine derivatives, but in the end he found there was nothing really to compare with good old dynamite.
“The bloke who invented this stuff ought to get a prize.”
He would wax lyrical, with a lot of scientific detail, about the explosive’s qualities – how easy it was to handle, how stable and so on – but beneath all this serious, even solemn pontificating was the nostalgia of the schoolboy who had never grown out of playing with firecrackers. That very morning, as soon as he landed on this unknown continent, Ben had rented a car at Roissy and driven into Paris to do some shopping in DIY stores and car shops. That afternoon, before setting to work on the polenta, he had started “cooking,” as he called it, watched by his uncle, a nitroglycerine paste in the Blakes’ laundry room. He had mixed sulphuric and nitric acid, and then bicarbonate of soda, in three receptacles surrounded by ice, with an eye on a thermometer buried in the concoction.
“It’s a bit hot in here, Uncle.”
“Does that matter?”
“If it goes over twenty-five degrees, there’ll be nothing left, not us, not the house, not the Feds, not the street.”
Fred gave his mobster chuckle, but felt a wave of heat inside him that could have wiped out the Rue des Favorites. Ben added the glycerine with a dropper and waited for it to rise to the surface before transferring it to another container. Then he had checked it with a slip of litmus paper, which had remained a fine royal-blue colour. Then he had solidified the paste by mixing it, amongst other things, with sawdust, rolled it up in pieces of cardboard with a fuse in each stick. At five o’clock, a bit before the arrival of the other three Blakes, Ben had placed a quantity of dynamite sufficient to dig a second Channel Tunnel in an old biscuit tin. Then at last he was able to turn his mind to preparing the polenta, boiling it up, splashing it on the walls, beating it until his arms ached.
At the foot of the north pillar of the factory, he climbed onto the huge evacuation pipe which poured straight into the Avre; he jumped on it once or twice to test its stability. Then he went back to his uncle, who had just broken down the door between the goods-reception area and the main building. After checking with flashlights that no one was lingering there, they followed an old reflex and checked all the installations; all they found were containers containing goodness knows what, barrels of all shapes and sizes, steel piping, nothing transportable or saleable – most discouraging. They went back out and got to work. This was the interesting stage of Ben’s work – deciding on the best places to plant the explosive. This was where his sixth sense came into play; his intuition could guarantee a quick and efficient outcome, depending on whether you wanted a simple collapse or a proper explosion.
“Hey, Uncle, what do you fancy? House of cards collapsing or big bang?”
Fred thought that, it being night-time and deep country, they hardly needed to be discreet.
“Let’s have something spectacular – like the final explosion at the Coney Island fireworks.”
The nephew couldn’t help chuckling, but he took Fred’s request quite seriously. If he hadn’t chosen a life of crime, Ben would no doubt have become one of those demolition artists who could make a whole building disappear in a fine cloud of dust. The last building he had demolished, on the orders of and in the presence of his uncle, had been an almost complete three-storey car park, with eight hundred spaces. It had been a long and tedious night, but those who had been there had, eventually, happy memories of it. Nowadays, on the exact site of the disaster, there is a small glass building, home to an import-export firm, Parker, Sampiero and Rosati.
Ready to obey his nephew’s instructions, Fred watched him work with the admiration he always felt for specialists in their field. In the past he had always surrounded himself with master craftsmen, in order to beat the opposition. You needed to make a guy confess everything and denounce his mother and father? Get Kowalski. He could break a man’s toes one by one without touching their neighbours – a true artist. You needed a good shot? Franck Rosello would raise his hand: he had been a decorated sniper in a war he never spoke about. His claim to fame was the single shot that had blown the head off a snitch in the van taking him to court. And even though Rosello never made the same exact shot twice, Fred had lain flat o
n the floor of the van when he had gone to court. To get into Manzoni’s Dream Team, you had to excel in a particular field: unearthing bugging devices, getaway driving and so on. This time Fred had called on his beloved nephew because of the dynamite-handling skills that had earned him his place on the team, and, as an added bonus, a new middle initial to his name.
“Now that we’re alone, tell me, Ben . . .”
“Tell you what?”
“That if they haven’t forgiven me, at least the others have understood why I talked.”
Ben had been dreading this conversation, and above all dreading having to tell the cruel truth. He was somewhat surprised at such a naive, hopeful question. His hero, Giovanni Manzoni, had used the word “forgiven”! Forgiven! God, he was a long way off the mark. He must be made to understand, once and for all, that whatever happened, there was never going to be any question of the Manzonis going home.
“I don’t want to upset you, Zio Giovà, but you’re fine here. The children are growing up, it’s a nice house, you’re becoming a writer.”
Ben, who was in exile himself, could imagine the terrible homesickness that weighed on his uncle’s heart.
“You’ll never go back, just get used to that idea. It’ll take two or three generations after Don Mimino’s death for the name of Manzoni to be forgotten. And between now and then, as long as there remains a single henchman alive who ever received a job, a favour, a roof, whose children he was kind to, he’ll empty his gun into your head without the slightest hesitation. You’ve become a bogeyman, Uncle; it’s not just the reward, it’s the honour that makes all the young ones want to kill you. Imagine the glory: the man who killed Giovanni Manzoni, the number-one enemy of all the made men in America. He’d be a living legend, and the younger generation would line up to kiss his hands.”
As he talked, he went on taping a bunch of five sticks onto one of the outer pylons, before venturing inside the building again to deal with some aluminium beams.