Malavita (4 page)

She thought no more of it, and continued around the shop, filling her basket, stopping at the drinks shelf.

“Peanut butter . . .”

“And then you wonder why one American in five is obese.”

“And Coca-Cola . . .”

The voices were close by, just behind the stack where Maggie was reaching down for a pack of beer. She couldn't help listening to the hushed conversation between the manager and two of his customers.

“I've got nothing against them, but they certainly make themselves at home wherever they are.”

“Of course there were the landings. But we've been invaded ever since!”

“In our day, and for our generation, it was nylon stockings and chewing gum, but what about our children?”

“Mine dresses like them, enjoys the same things, listens to the same music.”

“The worst thing is the food they eat. I cook something they like, and all they can think of is to leave the table as quick as they can and rush off to McDonalds.”

Maggie felt hurt. By treating her as a typical American, they had cast doubt on all her goodwill and efforts at integration. It was a cruel irony, particularly for somebody who had been cast out of her country and had lost her civic rights.

“They've got no taste in anything, that's for sure.”

“Barbarians. I know, I've been there.”

“And if you tried to settle there,” the manager concluded, “just imagine how that would go down!”

Maggie had suffered enough in the past from all the sidelong glances, the muttering behind her back, the general sarcasm when she appeared in public, the wild rumours which were impossible to disprove. This unlucky threesome had unwittingly stirred up all these memories. The paradox was that if they had invited her to join in their conversation, she would have agreed with a lot of what they said.

“And they want to be the masters of the universe?”

Without revealing anything, she went over to the household-goods section, added three bottles of paraffin and a box of matches to her basket, paid at the cash desk and went out.

Outside, the last rays of the sun were disappearing and afternoon was fading into evening. The staff were beginning to feel tired, the customers were hurrying along, everything was as usual on this March evening at six o'clock, the same rituals, the same sleepy atmosphere.

So what was that smell of burning rubber that was just beginning to reach the nostrils of the cashiers?

One of the customers gave a great scream. The manager looked up from his order book and saw a strange curtain of fire undulating over the shop window. An impenetrable curtain of leaping flame began to spread into the shop.

A warehouseman reacted first and called the fire brigade. The customers looked for an emergency exit. The cashiers just disappeared, while the manager, for whom the shop and his life were one and the same thing, stood paralysed, hypnotized by the red-and-gold light dancing before his eyes.

The Cholong-sur-Avre volunteer firemen were unable to save the awnings, the display or the merchandise. In fact nothing was saved from the fire, except a case of slightly bruised Granny Smiths.

*

Belle and her classmates left the
lycée
at the last bell. A few diehards leaned against the gates, cigarette in the lips or mobile in hand, in no hurry to go home, while others rushed off as quickly as they could. She walked some of the way with Estelle and Lina, and then continued on her own along the boulevard Maréchal Foch, without any hesitation about the route. Belle was one of those people who walked with her head high and a light step, curious about everything around her, convinced that the horizon would always be more interesting than the pavement. This attitude summed up her whole personality, this way of always going forwards, confident both in herself and others. She was the opposite of her brother, who would always be marked by the wounds of his childhood; she was able to stay one step ahead of her past, never allowing it to catch up with her, even at the most difficult moments. Nobody except her knew where this strength came from – the sort of strength that is so often lacking in those who have seen their whole lives turned upside down overnight. And even if she was still feeling the tremors from that earthquake, she certainly had no desire for victim status. Instead of wasting energy on regrets, she turned it towards her future development, no matter what problems there were to surmount. And nothing and nobody would stop her.

An old metallic grey Renault 5 drew up alongside her. Inside it, some young people were trying to attract her attention. They were the seniors who, that same afternoon, had been so overcome by the sight of the new girl's red bra. They had been determined to get to know her, to make her welcome and show her the sights.

“No thanks, boys . . .”

She walked on towards her house, amused by the thought of being picked up on the first day in the school. However, she had no need for reassurance about her charms – they had been there for ever, since the day she was born. Her parents had called her Belle, not realizing how apposite the name would be. So much resonance in such a small word. How were they to know that the name would be a problem in France? At that time neither Maggie nor Fred quite knew where France was.

“Oh, please, please, Miss America!”

They were so insistent that Belle began having doubts about the way home.

“Where do you live?”

“Rue des Favorites.”

“It's that way! Jump in, and we'll drop you at your house.”

She let herself be persuaded, and climbed into the back. The boys were silent for a moment, surprised at their success. They had expected a refusal, and were thrown by this unexpected turn of events. Perhaps this girl was less shy than the others, a bit more daring? Americans were so advanced in every way, especially when it came to morals. They glanced at each other surreptitiously and allowed themselves to dream.

“Look, boys, we seem to be going the wrong way.”

Instead of answering, they bombarded her with questions about her life before Cholong. They were tense compared to her, and filled the silences with random remarks; they sought to demonstrate their coolness and savoir-faire, to show that they were sophisticated men of the world; she was amused by such childishness. The car slowed down at the edge of the forest of Vignolet, by the main road that led towards Brittany.

“Why are we stopping?” she asked.

Night had suddenly fallen. The chatter had been replaced by suspicious silences. Belle once again asked them to take her home. The boys got out and quietly exchanged a few words. With a bit of luck they wouldn't have to try very hard and it would all be like in a film, with a kiss from the new girl, perhaps a few caresses, you never knew, why not. And if it was no good, they could easily play the innocents. Belle was thinking about all the things she had to do when she got home: filling out the forms for the school records, working out her timetable and comparing it with her brother's, labelling all her school books, making a list of what was missing – it would be a long evening. She stood leaning against the car door with her arms crossed, waiting for one of these two cretins to understand that the outing was over. Before giving up, they made a last attempt, and one of them put a cautious hand on Belle's shoulder. She let out an exasperated sigh, picked up a tennis racket from the back seat, and with a perfect forehand smashed the side of the racket on the daring one's nose. The other one, shaken by this sudden and violent gesture, backed away, but was unable to avoid a sort of backhand volley that nearly took off his ear. Once they were on the ground, their faces covered in blood, Belle knelt down to look at them, with the professionalism of a nurse. She had quite recovered her sweet smile and her goodwill towards her fellow man. She got into the car and, turning towards them once more, said:

“Boys, if that's the way you go about it, you're never going to get anywhere with girls.”

She drove off towards the main road whistling a Cole Porter tune, then left the car a hundred metres from the Rue des Favorites and walked the rest of the way. She met her mother at the gate coming back at the same time, and helped her carry in the shopping. Warren, arriving at the same time, shut the gate behind them and all three went into the house.

Frederick, who was feeding the dog, with one knee on the ground, wasn't surprised to see his entire family coming in at once. He said:

“So – anything new today?”

As if they had rehearsed it, all three replied in chorus:

“Nothing new.”

How much is one man worth? What price a human life? To know what one is worth is like knowing the date of one's death. I'm worth twenty million dollars. It's a lot. But much less than I thought. I must be one of the most expensive men in the world. To be so valuable and to live a life as shitty as mine – that's the worst misery. If I had that twenty million dollars, I know what I'd do with it: I'd give the whole thing away in exchange for going back to my previous life, before I was worth that much. The man who blows my head off, what will he do with the money? He'll put it in property and go off to hang out in Barbados for the rest of his life. They all do that.

The irony is that, in my previous life, I sometimes had to take care of someone with a price on his head, like I have today (“take care of” with us means stopping the guy in question from doing any more harm). Liquidation of witnesses wasn't my speciality, I was sidekick to a hitman (a contract killer as outsiders call them) who had been told by my then bosses to whack that snitch Harvey Tucci, for two hundred thousand dollars – unheard of. We had to scratch our heads for weeks to find a way of preventing him from going before a grand jury, and I'm talking about a time when the FBI hadn't quite got the hang of guarding the stool pigeons (we showed the Feds a thing or two, but that's another story). Anyway, the contract on me is a hundred times bigger than that ass Tucci's. Try and imagine for a second what it's like to be exposed to the flower of organized crime, the most determined killers, the greatest professionals, all ready to drop you on any street corner. I should be scared stiff. Fact is, deep down, I'm quite flattered.

 

“Maggie, make me some tea!”

Fred had shouted loud enough from the veranda to wake Malavita, who gave a little growl and went straight back to sleep. Maggie heard, too, but felt no sense of urgency, and remained slumped in front of the television screen in the bedroom. Fred, irritated by the lack of response, risked losing the thread of his inspiration, and left the typewriter.

“Didn't you hear me?”

Lying back on the bed, annoyed by her husband's intrusion just at the denouement of the soap plot, she paused the cassette.

“Don't play the macho Italian with me, will you?”

“But . . . I'm working, sweetie . . .”

Maggie had to suppress her irritation at the word “working,” irritation which had been mounting ever since they had arrived in Cholong a month earlier.

“Might we know what it is you're doing with that typewriter?”

“I'm writing.”

“Don't fuck with me, Giovanni.”

She only used his real name in extreme situations, either very tense or very tender ones. He was going to have to confess to what he had been doing on the veranda from 10 a.m. onwards, bent over a bakelite antique, and explain to them the full urgency of this project which had filled him with such unusual energy and plunged him into such delicious confusion.

“You can make fools of the neighbours if you like, but please spare me and your kids.”

“I've TOLD you, I'm WRITING, for Christ's sake!”

“You can hardly even read! You couldn't even write down the things you say! The neighbour at number five told me you were hatching something about the Normandy landings! I had to nod like an idiot . . . The landings? You don't even know who Eisenhower was!”

“Fuck the landings, Maggie. That was just a pretext. I'm writing something else.”

“Might I know what?”

“My memoirs.”

At that, Maggie realized that all was lost. She had known her husband for ever, and now it seemed he was no longer the man she had known a month ago, the man whose every gesture and intonation she knew by heart, and understood.

And yet Fred wasn't lying. He had, with no regard for chronology, been going back, as the whim took him, over the happiest period of his life, the thirty years he had spent at the heart of the New York Mafia, and then the most painful – the time when he turned government witness. Captain Thomas Quintiliani had, after tracking him for four years, succeeded in cornering clan boss Giovanni Manzoni, and had forced him to testify at a trial which had brought down three of the biggest gang leaders, the
capi
who controlled the East Coast. One of them was Don Mimino,
capo di tutti i capi
, the head of all the “five families” in New York.

There had followed the period of the Witness Protection Programme, “WITSEC,” those stinking arrangements that supposedly protected those who had snitched from reprisals. Reliving the most shameful moments of one's existence was no doubt the price anyone would have to pay for embarking on the writing of their memoirs. Fred would have to spell out every letter of every forbidden word: snitching, flipping, ratting out on your friends, condemning the oldest of them to sentences ten times their great ages and a thousand times their life expectancy (Don Mimino had copped three hundred and fifty-one years, a number everyone found perplexing, including Quintiliani). Fred would not duck out of it, he would go right to the end of his confession; that was one thing you could count on – he never did anything by halves. In the days when he was in charge of eliminating troublesome types, he would never leave any identifiable pieces lying around; if he was in charge of protection in some particular district, no shopkeeper was allowed to escape his payoff, not even the man selling umbrellas in the street. The hardest part of the story would be reliving the two years spent preparing for the trial; it had been a period of total paranoia, when he moved hotels every four days, surrounded by agents, and only saw his children once a month. Up until that famous morning when he had held up his hand before all of America and taken the oath.

Before reaching that point, however, he would relive gentler memories, rediscover the best part of his life, the happy days of his youth, his first gun, his baptism of fire and his official reception into the brotherhood of Cosa Nostra. The blessed time when it was all in the future, a time when he would have strangled with his bare hands anyone who had suggested that he would one day be a traitor.

“Quintiliani thinks it's a good idea, being a writer.”

Tom Quintiliani, the old enemy who had nonetheless been responsible for the safety of the Blakes for the last six years, had given him the green light. They knew from experience that anyone living under guard would sooner or later attract the attention of the neighbours. Fred would need to justify some kind of sedentary activity to them.

“I thought it was a good idea, until you actually started doing it, you shit!”

The fact was that the whole neighbourhood now knew that an American writer had come to live amongst them in order to write a great masterpiece about the Normandy landings. Being known as the writer's wife gave Maggie no pleasure. On the contrary, she felt that Fred's deception would eventually bring nothing but trouble. Not to mention Belle and Warren who, when filling in their class registration forms, had left blank the space that said “parents' profession.” They would have greatly preferred to tell their friends and the whole staff that their father was a model-maker, or the European correspondent of an American fishing magazine, anything that wouldn't arouse any real curiosity. There was no doubt about it – their father's sudden literary vocation was going to cause complications.

“You might have thought of something more discreet,” Maggie said.

“Like architect? Like in Cagnes? That was your brilliant idea. People kept asking me how to build swimming pools and pizza ovens.”

They had had this conversation a thousand times, and a thousand times they had nearly come to blows. She held Fred responsible, with some justification, for the constant moving, for their inability to settle anywhere. Not content with having exiled them to Europe, Fred had managed to attract attention as soon as they had arrived in Paris. He had always been used to having wads of cash for everyday spending, and then he had decided that the protection programme wasn't giving him enough to live decently. There he was, a top-class witness who had put away the top criminals, forced to live like a third-rate bag-carrier. Never mind. Since Quintiliani refused to increase his allowance, Fred had bought a huge deep freeze on credit, and filled it with luxury items bought with bouncing cheques, which he then resold to the neighbours. (He had managed to pass himself off in the building as a wholesaler in frozen goods who would retail lobsters at ultra-competitive prices.) His little trade had been so unforeseeable, and so unlikely, and so discreetly carried out, that the Feds had only found out about it when the bank started complaining. Tom Quintiliani, the great witness-protection pro, had been able to fend off all threats, head off all possible connections with Mafia circles, and keep the Blake relocation secret, even from some of his own colleagues. He had foreseen everything. Except the comings and goings of shellfish in the Saint Fiacre building at 97 Rue Saint Fiacre, Paris 2.

Tom had been hurt by such an odious betrayal of the protection programme. To take such risks when such exceptional measures had been set in place, when he was the only witness ever to have been relocated to Europe – that showed the full extent of Fred's thoughtlessness and ingratitude. They had had to leave Paris for a small town on the Côte d'Azur. Fred, realizing that it had been a close shave, had finally calmed down.

Three years later, the Blakes had at last managed to blend into the background. In Cagnes, the children had reached their previous scholastic level; Maggie was doing a correspondence course, and Fred was spending his afternoons on the beach, swimming in summer and walking in winter, alone apart from the distant presence of one of Quintiliani's agents. During those long hours of solitude, he had mulled over all the stages that had brought him to this point, those twists and turns of fate which would, he thought, have made a good story. In the evenings he sometimes went down to a bar for a game of cards and a pastis with the locals.

Until the fateful day of the pinochle game.

That evening his card partners began talking about their lives, their small worries, but also their small professional successes: a raise, a free cruise, a promotion. They had had a bit to drink, and began to laugh at Fred the American architect's silence; they started to gently tease him about his apparent idleness – the only things they had seen him build were sandcastles and card houses. Fred had taken all this without flinching, but his silence only encouraged the sarcastic remarks. Late in the evening, pushed to the limits, he had finally cracked. He, Fred, had never had to wait for good marks or raps on the knuckles from his bosses! He had built his own kingdom with his bare hands, and he was the absolute master! He had raised armies! He had made the mighty tremble! And he had loved his life, a life no one could understand, least of all these assholes in this dump of a bar!

After his hurried departure for Normandy, a rumour went round the little quarter of Cagnes-sur-Mer that the American had gone home to get treatment for his nervous troubles.

“Here, Maggie, they'll leave me in peace. They leave writers in peace.”

At that she left the room, slamming the door, with the firm intention of leaving him in peace until death.

*

Mme Lacarrière, the music teacher, regarded Miss Blake's late arrival in her class as a miracle. Belle, unlike those who regarded her class as an opportunity to finish a maths exercise or read through an essay, took the lesson very seriously and joined in on everyone else's behalf. She was the only one who knew major from minor, or that Bach came before Beethoven, or who could even sing in tune. The tragedy of Mme Lacarrière's twelve-year teaching career had hitherto been that she had never found
the pupil
 – the one who would have discovered music through her, who would have continued with the subject, who would have played and composed, and who would have made her role as a teacher, so often put into question, entirely worthwhile.

“I say, Miss Blake . . .”

All the teachers, disconcerted by the name Belle, preferred to address her as “Miss Blake.”

“The
lycée
is organizing an end-of-term concert, with parents and graduates invited. I'm in charge of the choir, which is going to sing Haydn's
Stabat Mater
. I would very much like it if you could join us.”

“Out of the question.”

“What?”

“You can count me out!”

She had given the same answer to the French teacher, who was putting on a sketch written by the pupils. Ditto to Mme Barbet, who was choreographing a modern dance tableau.

“But . . . Think about it . . . Your parents will be there, I should think . . . And the mayor, and the local press . . .”

“I've thought about it.”

Belle got up and walked out of the class, without permission, before the amazed stares of her classmates; she decided to go and work off her rage in the playground. The local press . . . Just thinking of Quintiliani's reaction made her give an uncharacteristic groan. The witness-protection programme strictly forbade protected families from appearing in any photos or making any public appearances. Belle began to resent those who even suggested that she play any part in this damned end-of-term show.

“You're just being shy, Belle. Appearing in public might help! A lot of people have conquered their shyness by acting in plays.”

Her, shy? She had the confidence of a film star! She was as bold as a saloon-bar singer! But she was forced to conceal the real reason for her refusal from those who were urging her to appear on stage:
I'm not just a little idiot waiting to be begged – it's just that I can't show myself anywhere, the United States of America have forbidden me. Apparently I would be risking my life and my family's life, and it'll be like that for as long as I live.