The Four Corners of Palermo (28 page)

Every one of us keeps relics, and our memories in particular brim over with them: fragments of conversations, images, states of mind, little objects. We venerate them as if they
were a saint’s thighbone. Our own personal saints: secular, misbelieving, carnal saints. I once knew a girl who carried a rock with her everywhere she went. She kept it in her stylish leather Tolfa handbag. It was a small, smooth stone, from a distant beach. A hippie who was in love with her had picked it up on a Pacific beach. She was never without her South Sea stone: “It tells me where to go, it keeps me in equilibrium.” Those were years of starry sentiments, words plucked out of the skies above, crystal-clear eyes.

Filomena’s necklace only remained in Maria Pecoraino’s purse for the time it took to get home from the Children’s Hospital. She wrapped it in an embroidered handkerchief, and once she was back in her bedroom, she decided where to keep it: she opened the Empire-style drop-front dresser that stood at the foot of her bed, pulled out a small red velvet box from inside the drop front, and slipped the necklace into it. She snapped the box shut: that sound was a foreshadowing of the closing of the small white casket. Then she hid the key in the top drawer, under her handkerchiefs.

It was February 16, 1982. Almost two years later, the Empire-style dresser would be rifled through by the nimble gloved fingers of a thief who only stole
honest things
.

I returned home with a picture in my mind: a view over the shoulder of the man looking out to sea. Hope or despair? I wavered between the two, thinking back over the whole story as it slowly reassembled itself. What hope had Giovanni Neglia had of surviving his own fatal misstep? And what kind of despair lay in wait for Rosalia? The despair of truth? Should I have told her the whole truth? Left out the details? Explained
to her that a little girl had died young and a mother would never again be a whole person? Would she have understood? Would it have been enough for Rosalia to understand the horrible cruelty suffered by her father and her family?

I sensed the intolerable disproportion between the offense and the punishment, a punishment inflicted in the name of a code of justice that was as pitiless as it was primitive. I needed to think it over, choose carefully the words to use with her, and in my paper.

I needed Lilli; I needed her gentle sweetness: I needed to get my thoughts back into proportion.

“
Mio amore
, where have you been?”

She welcomed me at the door with a warm hug. I felt that warmth loosen the hardest knots inside me: I would have liked to curl up and go to sleep inside her.

“The story of the severed head.”

“You always see such horrible things.”

“I’m a beat reporter: I have no choice.”

“Do you want something to drink? Fabrizio bought some beer.”

I heard “Father and Son” wafting in from the living room. Lilli loved Cat Stevens; Serena hated him.

“
Grazie
, my sweet love.”

She got out a quart bottle of Messina beer and a couple of glasses. We sat down on the brown sofa.

I felt like crying. Lilli took my hand: she caressed it as if it were velvet, with the grain. I felt the warmth of her embrace spread through me again. That girl was my sunshine.

We drank our beer. Luckily, the next track came on: it was “Tea for the Tillerman.” And Fabrizio and Serena came home.

“Journalist, you really are one lucky man.”

I looked at her with a faint smile. Lilli said: “
Ciao
, Sere.”

“Hey all!” said Fabrizio, displaying an enormous cardboard tray wrapped in pale-pink bakery paper.

“
Sfincione
,” he said. A deep-dish Sicilian pizza, a specialty of Palermo. “We’re celebrating tonight,” he added.

“Celebrating what, Fabri?”

“Top scores on my business management test. A-plus-plus. You understand? Plus-
plus
!”

It had been a big hump to get over, as he’d explained to me at length. I was happy for him, and for us, because now we had a couple of kilos of warm aromatic
sfincione
.

The evening had found a new point of equilibrium. I took off Cat Stevens, and I put on “Young Americans.” A little funky Bowie was an open window with a view of the future I was dreaming of, far away from the ferocity of Palermo.

The Mafia has always believed that control of a specific territory is one of the foundations of real power. You’re powerful only if you’re in control, and only if everyone knows you’re in control. In the spring of 1982, when Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was appointed the prefect of Palermo, a debate arose immediately over the powers that had been conferred on the legendary terrorist hunter, along with his new position. The debate
didn’t last long: the Italian state hadn’t given Dalla Chiesa any real power. Everyone agreed on that point, even Dalla Chiesa himself, and he demanded an explanation from the man who had sent him down to Sicily, Interior Minister Virginio Rognoni. In return he received promises that were never kept, and no real power. Five months later, the Mafia assassinated the general, his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, and their driver, Domenico Russo. A resident of the quarter hung a pen-and-paper sign on the place where they were murdered: “Here died the hope of all honest Palermitans.” It was temporarily true. But the murder of Dalla Chiesa also contained another truth, so well understood by the Mafia: you can’t win if you don’t have control. Dalla Chiesa was intelligent but helpless. Unlike the mob bosses who ordered his death
.

The capi of Cosa Nostra not only had the power of control, but also had the duty to show they possessed it. Their murders had to make a point. Everyone had to understand. The Corleonese took the great leap forward: they brought the strategy of massacres to Palermo with a succession of car bombs and dynamite buried under the asphalt, and assaults on the highway; they introduced a degree of ferocity that had never been seen before. Cutting off a head was an obligatory phase in that escalation, in that delirium of murderous power. If life were a lecture, then the decapitation of Giovanni Neglia would represent the phrase “for example.”

Castrenze Neglia finished covering the last vat of tuna roe with salt. His assistant helped him to put back the
balatone
, the large, smooth stone that weighed down the salt and roe in the press. He wiped the sweat off his face and scratched his head.

He thought about his brother, Giovannuzzo, his mouth pursed in a whisper on the front page of the newspaper: he felt
like throwing up. He’d handed him over to his murderers; he’d betrayed him without thinking twice, bending his knee when Salvatore “Salvo” Incorvaia had made his demand, in the face of his brutal and ferocious extortion: “Castrenze, my darling boy, we know that he was the one who stole the necklace, the fences in the Borgo told us so. Bring him to us, and we’ll beat him black and blue. You can go back to
travagghiare
with your tuna roe. And he’ll have paid his debt to my cousins, the Pecoraino family. It’s better for you to do it this way, believe me.”

My darling boy
. Those three words came out flat from between the thin grayish lips of Salvo Incorvaia. Castrenze was afraid of that man—so young, so evil. He answered yes with his eyes as he looked down. The next night he used some excuse to persuade Giovanni to come down to the fish market, behind the Cala. And there Giovanni found Salvo waiting for him, with an armed escort: two
picciotti
. Giovanni looked at his elder brother in bewilderment: he couldn’t understand. Castrenze took two steps back, arched his eyebrows as if to say, “What can you do about it?” Castrenze knew that Giovanni was about to take a beating, that he was about to pay his debt in the coin of physical pain: but in Palermo, it’s better never to leave a debt unpaid.

What can you do about it, Giovannuzzo?

He went home, certain he’d have to explain the next day that he’d done it for Giovanni’s own good. A beating, a pounding, a clubbing, and then you’re done. Anything, everything, but not a severed head on the front page of the newspaper, whispering over and over again:
You betrayed me, and you’re my brother
.

His assistant left for the day. They’d replenished the salt on all the tuna roe. He washed his hands, picked up a pad of
graph paper, and wrote a couple of lines in off-kilter block print, in a hybrid language all his own:
IT WAS BEEN THE INCORVAIAS, DOWN AT THE SEEFOODE MARCKET
. He folded the sheet of paper, slipped it into a yellow envelope, the kind you use to send certified letters, and wrote the address of the newspaper and the name of the reporter who’d written the articles about Giovannuzzo’s murder, stamped it, and mailed it.

People in Palermo pay their debts.

A certified letter from an illiterate. There it sat, on my desk, tossed there by Saro as he was distributing the morning mail: in the name, address, and city, I counted five misspellings. I opened it. And my theory was confirmed: illiterates know everything.

I reread those two lines in block print. The Incorvaias: exactly. The Pecorainos’ cousins. It was them, down at the seafood market.

I checked in with the news editor; we decided to turn the anonymous letter over to Gualtieri. I was looking for his direct number when the phone on my desk rang. The switchboard informed me that there was a girl who wanted to talk to me.

“Who is it?”

“She wouldn’t say.”

“All right, put her through.”

I’d guessed who it was.

“
Ciao
, Rosalia.”

She said nothing. I could hear her breathing.

“I have to talk to you. Could you come to Da Cofea, right away?” There was a mournful tone to her voice.

“I’m on my way.”

I put the anonymous letter in my pocket, grabbed my cloth jacket, and galloped downstairs.