Assignment - Palermo (15 page)

“It would help.”

“And we will inquire about Gabriella Cimadori Vanini. A powerful name, a powerful family. You wish to find Zio, not so? You see, I am most logical. To find Vecchio Zio, you need the girl. But others in Palermo may remember her as a child and remember other things you must know. We will do both. We will look for O’Malley’s friends and ask people about Gabriella.”

Durell nodded. McElroy’s pills were working.

A mile from Acquasanta’s luxury hotels the city of Palermo properly began, curving around the harbor toward the dark loom of Monte Pellegrino. There are some areas in Palermo where no stranger in his right mind should walk alone. But Cefalu knew his city. They drove past the Foro Umberto and then up the Via Cerda, twisting and turning without prediction. Palermo was busy at this evening hour, which was still too early for dinner. Durell did not think they were followed, and Cefalu’s evasive tactics took care of any chance of that. He decided that Cefalu might be right. Kronin had surely warned Uccelatti that he was coming. The Fratelli were both efficient and ruthless.

The dark streets canted steeply uphill at an angle that made the taxi shake and groan. Cefalu turned into another alley, came out on a tiny piazza where there was a magnificent view of the Opera House and the Cathedral, the latter like a fortress, even with its delicate Gothic towers. There was a glimpse of San Cataldo, with a bell tower that reflected Norman severity mixed with fanciful Arab grace, and red Byzantine domes squatting like enormous round eggs amid a nest of architectural tolerance. Then Cefalu plunged them back into another alley and halted before a singularly blank door.

“We will ask Mama Donatti first.”

“Who is she?”

“A witch, perhaps. An old friend. She knows everything. She is a receiver of stolen goods.” Cefalu rang the bell and shifted his weight impatiently. “Someone in this city must have useful information, signor. All we must do is find that certain someone.”

A small girl with lank hair and a black dress that came down to her dirty ankles opened the door about two inches, listened to what Cefalu said in rapid Italian, said, “Si,” and closed the door in their faces. They waited. The door did not open again. Cefalu knocked and pounded. No one came. Cefalu cursed. Then the little girl returned.

“Mama is not at home.”

“Where is she,
carissima?
”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you let us in to wait for her?”

“It is not permitted. Mama does not wish to speak to you, signor.”

“How do you know, if she is not at home?”

The child bit her lip and tried to slam the door shut. Cefalu would have smashed it open again, but Durell checked him. “Let it go. Try someone else.”

They walked along twisting alleys between ancient tenements that were old when Frederick the Swabian ruled here in Byzantine magnificence, perhaps as old as the time when the Arabs flourished and sang their songs of praise to Palermo’s beauty. Cefalu led them into a dark courtyard that smelled of things Durell did not care to identify, then up a moldy stairway to another door. Radios blared. They heard the inanity of guitar-cum-folksong and a recording from Figaro. It made a curious antiphonal blend of sound. A stout woman in a black dress came to the door. She had been weeping. Inside, Durell glimpsed a wall of votary candles and an incredible display of icons, dominated by a plaster, painted statue of Santa Rosalia, the patroness of Palermo, who, although the daughter of a duke, died as a hermit in a cave on Monte Pellegrino. “Cefalu, go away,” the weeping woman said.

“But I must talk with you, Carmella.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Am I stupid enough to be brave? Go away.” 

“You were told not to speak?”

“Yes, I was told.”

“I have given you much business, Carmella.”

“Not enough to buy my life.”

“We look for two Americans. Two Fratelli.”

“They are not Fratelli any more.”

“But you know of them?”

“I cannot help you, Cefalu. You are a fool.” She began to curse him without emotion and told him he was doing her great harm by coming to her. Cefalu gave it up and said, “We will try elsewhere.”

On the way down the tenement stairs, Durell said, “It looks like the word is already out.”

“Yes. They may not be alive any more.”

They spent another hour inquiring among the warrens and hovels of Palermo. In some places the door was not even opened, although they could hear mutterings inside. In another, a man began to shout in a fine Sicilian rage and drew a knife on them. Cefalu retreated with many apologies. In a third place, a small bar, he went through the back doorway, curtained with stringed beads, and ordered wine from the thin, scuttling waitress. The wine never arrived. Two men who had been seated at a round, scarred table got up and left. After twenty seconds Durell suggested that they leave, too. Cefalu agreed it was a good idea.

“We will try some girls I know.” Cefalu winked lasciviously. “My wife does not permit me to visit such terrible places, but after all, this is business.”

The house was just around the corner from a red stone church with a facade of delicate Greek columns stolen from ancient ruins. The street was dark and cobbled. The house itself looked better than its slum neighbors. Durell suggested they try the back way in.

“No, no, that will be dangerous,” Cefalu objected. “The bold, direct approach is always best here.” Cefalu insisted that this was their last hope. “I have brought many customers to Firenza’s girls. It is a remarkable place. She owes me much. If anyone knows about Gabriella and your two friends, Firenza will have learned of it by this hour. And she will tell us.”

A traditional red globe shone just inside the curtained doorway. The entrance was open. A man in a blue pinstriped suit, with black hair pomaded close to his narrow skull, jumped up and began to protest about something. Cefalu called loudly for Firenza, and there was a sudden break in the dance music they could hear from a parlor beyond, and a sudden babble of girlish voices, then a deep shout that should have been a man’s but came from the madame’s throat. Firenza swayed in, an enormously fat woman with a moustache, and flung her arms around the diminutive Cefalu in a greeting that crushed him against her bulbous breasts. She wore a lemon silk gown decked with fringes at the waist, and her face was a reflection of primitive joy. “Michelangelo! Come in, come in!”

It was the first place they had been welcomed, and therefore Durell had to assume they had been expected and that it was a trap. He hoped the huge Firenza wouldn’t hug him, with his aching shoulder. But the madame regarded him with an eye that weighed, measured, and evaluated his male attributes with an approving, professional eye. “Americano! You, too. Come in, and we have a party, yes?”

“We were just looking—”

“Then, look!” she said, and roared with laughter. She urged them into the parlor. An elaborate Zenith hi-fi stereo player started up full blast next to a round bar positioned exactly in the middle of the room. The bartender had moustaches like Salvatore Dali. There were illuminated religious paintings on the wall, which was paneled with lemon silk that matched Madame Firenza’s tasseled dress. Durell could see no windows. The barman’s hands dropped out of sight, but Firenza spoke sharply to him, and the man shrugged and began mixing drinks again.

Aside from these two, and three self-conscious customers, well-dressed and prosperous, pretending to read newspapers, the room was filled with half-naked girls. They came in all shapes and sizes, to suit the varied tastes of Firenza’s clientele, from a tall and lissome blonde in peekaboo panties to a short, stout, dark girl with an open kimono who stared at them with angry eyes and arms akimbo on fleshy hips. When they came in, the girls sprang to attention as if on command; they smiled, showed their teeth, rolled their buttocks, and strutted about the bar in postures both lewd and inviting. Someone turned the hi-fi up even louder when it played a tarantella. A few of the girls began to dance with each other, throwing back their heads and kicking off their satin slippers, letting out high, ululating cries, their bodies twisting orgiastically.

Durell felt a pair of somber brown eyes watching him, out of key with the mood of Firenza’s house. This girl was different from the others. She looked American and wore a silver evening gown like the skin of a snake, designed to conceal nothing beneath it. Nevertheless, she had an air of detachment as she sat in a comer chair, ignoring the crudities of her playmates. She even wore a pair of studious Franklin reading glasses, and the book in her sleek lap was Voltaire’s Candide in French. Her long hair was as silvery as her dress, but she couldn’t have been more than twenty.

While he returned her stare Michelangelo Cefalu spoke urgently to Madame Firenza.

“We must talk in private, sweetheart,” Cefalu told her. “It is very important.”

“Oh, yes, so I have heard,” Firenza said. “The city stinks of fear tonight, thanks to you and your tall friend.”

“But can you help us?”

“Come with me. One cannot hear a thing over this stupid uproar. My private office, please.”

They followed the stout woman down a pink-lighted hallway and through another door. The old-fashioned Victorian tassels and beads of the parlor yielded to a strictly modern business office that would have done credit to a Madison Avenue account executive’s suite. There was a gleaming safe, steel filing cabinets, an address rack, a steel desk, comfortable chairs with orange foam-rubber cushions, and a long settee. The wall paintings were Dufys. The room seemed soundproofed. Mama Firenza squeezed her rolls of heavy fat into her desk chair and sighed, patted her curled hair, and touched the dark moustache over her wide mouth.

She had stopped smiling. She was not amused. “Cefalu—and you, Americano—you are both insane or idiots,” When they said nothing, she added somberly, “And I am a fool to' even allow you in here, to let it be known I speak to you, after all of Palermo was advised to shut its doors against you.”

“Who advised it?” Durell asked in Italian.

“Speak English, please. I need the practice. It was the Fratelli della Notte, of course.”

“Do they subsidize you?”

“Sponsor, let us say. I owe them much. They have been very good to me. I would not betray them, so it depends on how I can help you. Cefalu is my good friend. If I talk to you, it is only because I wish to get him out of this mess you have gotten him into.” Cefalu said, “It is a simple matter,
cara
. We look for two Americans, a Signor Brutelli, a Signor Milan—” 

“I know, I know.”

“Do you know where they are, dear?”

Madame Firenza fixed cold, shrewd eyes on Durell. “I understand you are very rich. I am told you have twenty-five thousand dollars to buy information.” 

“That’s true,” Durell admitted.

“You have this with you?”

“Perhaps.”

“You do or you don’t.”

“I do.”

“
Buono
. So I can find your friends. But you want more than that.”

“We also look for Gabriella Vanini.”

“She is with Uccelatti,” she said promptly. “It is impossible to reach her.”

“And the man known as O’Malley?”

“He is on the yacht, too. Not as prisoners. As guests. Will you pay me five thousand dollars? Now, in my hand.”

“It depends on how you can help us.”

“I am told that you really look for Vecchio Zio. This is true madness. One does not even mention his name. His power is great. Women pray to him as if to a saint.

I cannot tell you where he is. I am reluctant to admit this, since you are rich and willing to part with so much American money. But it is a fact of life. One does not talk about Zio.”

“Long ago,” Durell said, “when Signorina Vanini was a little girl, she was taken to visit Vecchio Zio. The journey started from Palermo. It cannot be far. Perhaps you can lead us to someone who also went on that journey fifteen years ago.”

“I can,” the woman said flatly. She put her jeweled hands on the desk, like two lumps of dough into which someone had spilled rubies and diamonds. “There was the driver of the car, and Contessa Cimadori, of course.”

“The contessa will not help us.”

“I understand.” She looked sharply at Cefalu. “Are you sure you know what you do, Michelangelo? You cannot live in Palermo after this, I think.”

“If we succeed,” Durell insisted, “we will all be forgiven.”

“And if you are not, you are both dead men. . . . There was a driver and a nurse. They are both alive, both in Palermo. Quite nearby. But they have to be convinced.” Two extrusions of the doughy thumb and forefinger, rolled together in the universal gesture for money. “Cash talks, eh?”

“Five thousand?”

“For them. Another five for me.”

“It’s a bargain.”

“Done. You can pay me.”

Durell reached under his shirt and unzipped his money belt and took out the Geneva currency and counted five thousand dollars. He placed it in Firenza’s hands. The doughy fingers came alive, twisting and counting with marvelous rapidity. The woman’s breathing sounded loudly in the modern office. Her huge breasts lifted like Etna in eruption. She had an obvious passion for money.

“And the other five?” she whispered.

“When you deliver the driver or the nurse.” “Done,” she said again.

“How long will it take?”

“An hour. Make yourselves at home. Enjoy yourselves. Everything is on the house.” She began to laugh uproariously, heaving and swaying and wiping tears from her powdered and rouged face.

Durell couldn’t see anything that funny.

THE silver-haired girl with the Franklin half-glasses closed her Voltaire with a deliberate snap and walked across the room to Durell. It was difficult to see how she could maneuver that rich body in the skin-tight silver lame dress. Every twitch of every muscle reflected provocatively as she came to him.

“Mr. Durell, you seem bored,” she said.

She spoke American English. It was almost an hour later. The parlor of the establishment had been busy for a time, and most of the girls were upstairs with customers. The bartender with the Dali moustaches was counting his liquor supply. The hi-fi had been turned down to only a few decibels above the ear-splitting level. Durell had suggested that Cefalu stay with Madame Firenza while she pursued her quest and he returned to the reception room to stand guard against unexpected intruders. It seemed to Durell that Cefalu was taking far too much time.