Timebends (31 page)

Now the bell captain, a younger and more up-to-date man, intervened; he thought the one restaurant on the other side of town might serve lunch, but it was hard to spot, there being no sign on the window as yet. Holding both palms vertical, he instructed us how to traverse the broken city. Except for our morning coffee we had not eaten since yesterday when we boarded the little boat to cross the Strait of Messina along with a lot of Sicilian workers
who had had the sense to bring their own food. We set out briskly.

From the outside the hotel's windows were immaculately clean, a reassuring sign of the will to live, but a mountain of rubble leaned against the side wall, on which elegant wallpaper still clung, and carved plaster vines arched over bricked-up doorways. Puffs of cement dust blew up under every step we took, and eyebrows were white with lime. On every street men were climbing up and down ladders carrying hods, backbreaking loads of wet cement; occasionally a waiter in apron climbed a ladder carrying a tray of coffee and bread for some boss above. A donkey loaded with iron rods was trying to bite the arm of a boy attempting to make it move over rubble, a tiny Fiat truck with gears whining seemed about to capsize with a load twenty feet high. Stately black-clad women with faint mustaches commanded whole streets with their husky baritone complaints and spanked girls as old as sixteen for various infractions, forever sending them home. The men spoke only to other men. Two stories up, a woman in a window hefted her infant son, showing the city one of its naked little gods. But unlike Naples, Palermo had no whores in the streets. Along the broken harbor, whose piers lay overturned in the water, squadrons of brown rats worked over a fallen palm tree, as undisturbed by our passing as if licensed by the city. On the sunlit water under the perfect blue sky a lone freighter was unloading onto lighters the bags of American wheat that alone kept the city alive. With the national elections only weeks away, the American ambassador had come and made a speech and, it was said, had taken a handful of grain and poured it over the head of a small laughing boy and announced, quite needlessly, that if the Communists were elected this grain would naturally cease to arrive—merely one more sign that it was all over here, Italy was finished, a mendicant and a whore. Now and then a horse-drawn carriage went clopping by, a
carrozza
out of the nineties back in service as the country slid down into its past. But the workers still hurried up and down the ladders rebuilding and plastering walls in the sun with the immemorial Italian affection for wet cement.

The restaurant was the only completely reconstructed building on the shattered little square, and indeed it had no sign in its window. Coming in from the glare outside, we thought that the eight or ten white-clothed tables were all empty. The proprietor, the first fat Italian we had so far seen, looked surprised as he came out to greet us from behind a blue cotton curtain at the back and somewhat nervously asked what we wished, as though we might be his first postwar patrons. Not until we had taken our seats did
I happen to glance about and see this amazing row of silent people seated behind a banquet of a dozen tables that had been pushed together along one wall. The mere glance left me bewildered by their totally mismatched social levels. A bleached platinum nightclub blonde with deep rosy cleavage beside a traditional dark Sicilian mama wearing a black shawl over her head; a ruddy young boy of fourteen beside a peasantlike worker in denim shirt; a rather wan man with eyeglasses, possibly a newspaperman or an intellectual, between a thick laborer and a pallid businessman with a heavy mustache; two men who had to be gangsters in double-breasted suits and trimmed mustaches; another hooker with pearls in her hair beside a mild-looking family doctor type . . .

And all in absolute silence, unabashedly observing us in the otherwise vacant room. Everything was suddenly reversed; we were the actors, the Sicilians the audience. The menu was also a surprise, with the first lamb and mutton we had been offered in Italy; even in Naples and Rome there had been only fowl and fish. The proprietor rubbed his hands together in the usual welcoming gesture, but his charged eyes were still more preoccupied than warm. He left us and went—I was about to write “upstage”—and disappeared behind the blue curtain at the back.

Longhi was turning beet red as he studied his menu, and seemed to be forcing his eyes to stay on it. Between expressionless lips, he said, “Don't look now, but you know who's behind you?”

“Mussolini.”

“Stop fucking around, this is serious.”

“King Victor Emmanuel. Balzac. Louis B. Mayer.”

“Lucky Luciano.”

Like most newspaper readers, I was aware that Luciano had been exiled to Italy after Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey had nailed him as a Mafia chief, brutal killer, and head of prostitution, gambling, and other assorted rackets. Winning Luciano's conviction, at first thought impossible, had made Dewey a national figure; now he was favored to become, for the second time, the Republican nominee for president and to beat Truman in the coming election. Luciano was the prince of thieves, the worst, a veritable horned monster.

“Don't order that stuff.”

I heard Brooklyn and looked up to see the unforgettable face, which I recognized from photos, telling the proprietor, “Bring them my lunch,” whereupon he drew up a chair and sat at our table and the proprietor happily fled as though released from anxiety now that he had the permission he required.

“Cholly! God! . . .” Vinny thrust his hand at Luciano—whose proper name was Charles—as though the honor of it all was nearly beyond his powers to bear. Vinny's face, however, was perspiring.

“Where yiz from?”

“The States, Cholly.”

“Whe'bouts?”

“Brooklyn, Cholly. My name is Vincent Longhi, this is my friend Miller.”

I got only a passing nod as I was obviously not Italian. It was Longhi who interested him since, for one thing, Brooklyn had been his home base. It managed to occur to me that Vinny must no doubt have been the first Italian from Brooklyn of whose arrival in Sicily he had not been forewarned.

“Whe'bouts in Brooklyn?”

“Well, I'm spending a lot of time in Red Hook now, Cholly,” Vinny said, and laughed familiarly. “Home, huh?”

“Right, that's right. What do you do?”

“I'm a lawyer.”

Luciano gave a very short nod and turned to me. “You a lawyer too?”

“No, I'm a writer.”

“Wha' paper?”

“No, he writes plays, Cholly … you know, the theatre.”

Luciano nodded doubtfully. “What're you got in there?” He pointed to the leather box in which lay my eight-millimeter Kodak movie camera.

“That's my camera,” I said.

“I see it?”

As though up from the floor I felt body heat and, turning, saw beside me a six-footer standing over my camera box. He had a big pistol sticking out of his jacket, probably a thirty-eight. He was looking down at the box, which I now opened, taking out the camera. This he promptly removed from my hand and, making a half-turn so that it faced away from his master, opened it, then closed it and handed it back to me and said, “Thanks.”

My eye following his turning body, I saw that the entire line of diners along the wall had simply disappeared, were gone, vanished, and without a sound, not the scuff of a sole on the floor or the scrape of a chair. We were all alone.

Luciano's spring had ever so slightly slacked off, and he gave us an ordinary civilized depressed smile. “So what're yiz doin' here?”

“Just sort of touring around,” I said.

He nearly laughed at my joke. “Touring in
Palermo?”

As our lunch was served by the now reassured proprietor, Longhi explained his plan to locate the families and his ambition to be a congressman. Like Anastasia, Luciano took very seriously this manifest of the achieving spirit in a young Italian and gave it a deep look and many commendatory nods. I had a chance now to realize that I had never seen a face so sharply divided down the center. The right side was hooded, the mouth downturned and the cheek drawn flat. This was the side he killed with. The left, however, had an eye not at all cold but rather interested and intelligent and inquisitive, his social eye, fit for a family dentist. And he wore rimless middle-aged glasses. Lincoln was the only other man with so divided a face, at least that I could think of.

“Who do you know?” Luciano asked Vinny, who took a breath and ran off a list of Mafiosi none of whom, I was convinced, he had ever actually met but whose names were golden in the community as the great successes. Again like Anastasia, Luciano was aggrieved by injustices done him in the name of law, for he was even forbidden to set foot on the Italian mainland, let alone to visit his beloved Naples, where he claimed an aunt of his mother's lay dying, calling desperately for one last look at him. He insisted on paying our bill, dropping a lump of money on the table without counting it (“Shit, it's all funny money anyways”), and when I got up and said we were going to continue our little exploratory walk, he first offered and then insisted on driving us back to the hotel, where we had no desire to go for a few more hours.

I now invented: “I'm thinking of writing about Sicily, and I want to take a look around.”

“No, no, no, come on, we got the car, we drive you,” he persisted, and it was clear that we were not as yet to be let out of his sight. At this point the street door was unlocked by the bowing proprietor; I had not noticed it being locked in the first place.

“Beautiful car,” I said, admiring his sporty big green Lancia as we got in, the bodyguard behind the wheel with me beside him, and Vinny next to Luciano in the backseat.

“Gimme a Chevy anytime,” he said. He certainly was homesick. And in such captivity we were driven back to the hotel, an irritating comedy to me but from Vinny's anxious levity not to him.

Following Vinny's lead, I went to the desk, where we asked for our key just as Luciano was handed his. “You're in the next room!” he said and looked into my eyes. I could only confirm that, yes, our key numbers indicated we had adjoining rooms. With no desire to go upstairs I nevertheless found myself getting into the elevator ahead of Luciano rather than behind him, as I had offered to do,
he being my senior, and there was no talk at all as we waited to reach our floor, he with his back pressed against the elevator wall. At our doors we nodded farewell to him, unable to think of anything to say.

Vinny fell on his back on the bed holding his head. “Jesus Christ! And we got the next room, too!” His genuine worry surprised me. “But, man! We could be the FBI or some Mob guys who came to put a hole in his head! . . .”

If there was danger, it was making me sleepy, along with the uncustomarily elaborate lunch, and I lay down and napped. Vinny went on talking for a while but finally gave up and fell asleep too. I believed in a great many things in those days, among them the mystical protections of an American passport.

A knock woke us. Vinny was on his feet listening. Another knock. He glanced at me and swallowed. I started to laugh, and it began to infect him, and he bent over to smother his paroxysms. The third knock straightened him up. Somebody most definitely intended to see us and knew we were in here, and that could only be Luciano or a representative. Vinny opened the door.

A tall, marvelously handsome young man stood there in a blue navy watch cap and neat plaid mackinaw and peasant's brogans. “Signor Longhi,” he said, smiling, his whole being emanating command and ease of soul, a young man for whom the world was made. “I understand,” he said as he sat with us and removed his knitted cap with the casual confidence of one who owned everything south of Rome, “that you wish to tour Sicily.”

“That's right,” Vinny said, “but we are told there is no gasoline to be had.” Luciano was the only one who knew of our wish to tour the island.

“There is
some
gasoline,” the young man said.

“But we have no car, and it is difficult to rent . . .”

“There are
some
cars. When do you wish to start?”

“Well, how's tomorrow morning, is that possible?”

“Yes, it is possible.”

“We have some money but not too much. How much will it cost, do you know?”

“Oh, no, no, you are my guests. Unless you have some American cigarettes?”

We certainly did, and opened our bags to give him a few packs. When he saw our four cartons he took three of them, which he tucked under his arm. This offering of ours warmed his pride, and with some prompting from Vinny he began to tell his story. His
teeth were a row of square pearls, and his hands could knock a horse down, yet he seemed lithe and flat-bellied, a hero proud of his apparently fabulous rise in life.

He was now twenty-four, but as a mere teenager when the Germans had occupied the country he had managed to control the entire vegetable supply of Palermo “with the cooperation of the peasants,” in short, by dominating the roads into the city with his peasant gunmen. By the last year of the occupation he so totally controlled the gasoline dumps on the island that the Germans—he laughed with sly joy at this—had decided to give up trying to fight his men, whom they called bandits, and simply paid him a tax for every tank truck that moved into the city limits. This was entirely satisfactory.

His story finished, he rose, shook our hands, thanked us for the cigarettes, and left.

“He never gave us his name,” I said.

Resuming our walking tour of the half-ruined city, toward evening we headed in the direction of the single “nightclub-restaurant” and, rounding a corner, nearly ran into a man hardly five feet tall wearing a black cape and a beret and sporting a ferocious mustache and walking stick.

“Louie!”

“Vinny!”

Lifting him up off the ground, Vinny kissed the little fellow, who had been a New Yorker for more, than a decade after Mussolini exiled him in the thirties. Now he was back with a vengeance, having been elected to the Senate of the Sicilian Parliament.