Malavita (8 page)

They asked her to wait in a little room with a low table covered in magazines. Before she had made the appointment, Quintiliani had expressed some reservations.

“A charity? It's a deserving cause, Maggie, but pretty risky. You never know, there might be stuff in the papers, photos, I don't know . . .”

“I'll be careful.”

“What does Frederick think?”

“I haven't mentioned it to him.”

“I'll see, but I can't promise anything. You know your name and picture must never appear.”

All the same, Quint thought Maggie's initiative was a good one: she was integrating herself into the community at the same time as keeping herself busy – both activities encouraged by the protection programme. A few days later, he gave his permission in principle, for a trial period. Then they'd see.

Maggie had another, more personal reason for wanting to make herself useful to the poor. Destiny was offering her an opportunity, many years later, to pay a sort of tribute to her own modest origins, to revisit them, after having tried to deny them during the time of the Manzoni excesses. Unlike Giovanni, who was a natural son of the Cosa Nostra, brought up in the tradition of ever increasing financial profit, Livia had been born into a family of workers, who had remained workers all their lives. Now that she was nearly fifty, she began to remember her early youth again – it felt as though she had only just left that part of the East Side where, before they began killing one another, people from all over the world formed a single nation – the immigrants. She wondered why particular images would come back to her from her unconscious mind, like that of the moment on Friday nights when her father would hand his pay packet to her mother, a white envelope that had to keep them going until the following Friday. She remembered, too, how she had envied her elder sisters going off to their typing courses; Livia would follow as soon as she was old enough. She remembered almost hour by hour the long anxious night after her older brother, who worked for a chimney sweep, had stolen a box of jewellery from an apartment full of marble fireplaces. In the early morning, her father had gone down to the police station to fetch him, and young Aldo's career as a burglar had ended. She also remembered, too, the sad day when she had been bitten by a dog in a smart area of town; there had been no way of getting compensation, or even complaining. Above all, she remembered her mother, who had lived in daily fear of some new danger threatening her children, and her father, who had always kept his head down whenever there was an incident in the area. Livia had married Giovanni in order to escape from all that.

They asked her to come into the office. The interview took less than ten minutes.

“When could you start?”

“Straight away.”

*

Al Capone always said: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” That simple phrase, to me, explains the continuing success throughout the ages of the phenomenon that is the Mafia.

Fred stopped typing in order to think for a moment, but the last sentence didn't seem to lead on to anything else. What could he add to something that said so much in so few words? He supposed that was what was called literature. How could he explain to his future readers the magic he saw in these words? All his friends in Newark would have got the message straight away. By quoting Capone, Fred saw how useful it was to have his words backed up by the thoughts of a master. He threw the carriage back, and tackled a new paragraph.

A few yards away, Belle stood stark naked in front of the bathroom mirror, with a seamstress's tape measure, measuring the vital statistics of her splendid body, without missing out a single curve. She knew the basic measurements – chest, waist, hips, her body mass index (20), the hip/waist ratio (7), but she was curious about the rest: wrist, neck, calf, foot, forehead, thickness of arms, shoulder blade to armpit, distance between nipples and so on. Each time she found she was the perfect size.

Maggie, in the kitchen, was busy at the stove.
Pasta aglio e olio.
It was all very well spaghetti with garlic and oil being her speciality – neither her husband nor her children would contemplate a plate of pasta without tomato sauce. Fred just fiddled with his food when he was faced with sophisticated meat or herb sauces, or luxuries like truffles or lobster – what he called fancy food. Pasta, for him, meant red sauce, nothing else.

“You know I don't like that,” he said as he passed through the kitchen.

Maggie was at that crucial moment when you toss the spaghetti and garlic together in the pan before adding the fresh oil.

“What makes you think it's for you? If you want tomato sauce, you can make some this afternoon, between chapters.”

“So who's this pasta for?”

“Those two poor guys who are so far from home. Unlike us, they've done nothing to deserve it.”

He shrugged and asked what she was punishing him for. Maggie didn't deign to answer and, covering the dish with foil, left the house and went over to join Richard Di Cicco and Vincent Caputo, who were playing cards, with earphones on their heads.

“Someone ringing my house?” she said.

“Yes – it's someone called Cyril,” said Vincent. “I don't want to spill the beans, but he's been ringing Belle every day for a week.”

“Never heard of him. Let me know if she falls in love, boys.”

Instead of just suffering their presence, Maggie had learned to make use of the FBI. Quite apart from the true respect she felt for Quintiliani and his men, she now felt she was being protected rather than spied upon. Only heads of state normally got such treatment. No need to look through her husband's pockets or go through her children's drawers. The FBI could deal with it, and Maggie was safe from all the dangers that wives and mothers live in dread of. She wasn't proud of it, but neither was she ashamed of having made use of the high-tech methods at the Bureau's disposal to sort out her domestic problems. Fred's little acts of cowardice, Warren's little side-slips, Belle's little secrets – Richard and Vincent kept her informed.

“I've made you some
pasta aglio e olio
, Vincent.”

“Even my wife can't make it like you do, don't know why, maybe she puts the garlic in too soon.”

“How is she?”

“She's missing me, she says.”

This conversation highlighted the absurdity of their situation. Did those three have nothing better to do in life than hang out in an empty house in the middle of a little Norman town thousands of miles from home? Overcome with silent homesickness, they ate the pasta with little appetite. Maggie's presence was even more of a comfort than her cooking – just the fact of a woman looking after them, sometimes like a wife, sometimes like a sister. They knew she was sincere, and that trust had, over the years, become a valuable link between them. She would appear, and a wave of comfort and reassurance would help them to forget another silent day of boredom and regrets. Maggie helped them to hold fast and to continue to test the limits of their professional dedication.

In order to understand how Caputo and Di Cicco had come to be there, you had to go back six years, to the end of the “five families trial” as it had been known in the papers. The Manzonis had been taken in hand by the Witness Protection Programme. They had become the Blakes, a little family with no story, who had left the Big Apple to go and live in Cedar City, Utah, a town of eighteen thousand inhabitants, in mountainous country in the middle of a desert. The town ticked the right boxes – it was small enough not to have a crime syndicate but large enough to allow a modicum of anonymity. The Blakes settled into a residential area of rich retirees, and began adjusting to their new life of idleness as best as they could. It was a strange environment, a sort of imprisonment, but completely relaxing after all those stressful months. The shopping was delivered to the house, they signed up to correspondence courses, and they lived like recluses, ignored by the neighbours. Quintiliani had stuck with Fred since the end of the trial. He had been picked for his incredible tenacity as well as his Italian origins, and he had chosen Di Cicco and Caputo as his lieutenants for the same reasons. All three knew the Manzonis better than anyone, having followed them and listened in on them unceasingly for the four years until Giovanni was finally trapped. The Witness Protection Programme had set two goals to establish their reinsertion into society: schools for the children in Cedar City, and a job for Maggie, as long as their identity remained secret.

But they hadn't reckoned on the determination of the five families who controlled the state of New York.

Each one of them had lost two or three men by the end of the trial, not to mention Don Mimino himself, whose battalion of lawyers had been reduced to silence in the face of the mass of evidence supplied by Giovanni Manzoni as to his position as supreme leader of the Cosa Nostra: Brutus had plunged the knife into Caesar's heart. And so the five families had got together – money no object; anyone who could supply the smallest accurate piece of news about the whereabouts of the Manzonis could claim a reward of twenty million dollars. After this announcement had been made, squads of four or five hitmen had been assembled for the sole purpose of tracking down the Manzonis. Enzo Fossataro, who was acting boss of the families until Don Mimino named his successor, had made deals with the families in Miami, Seattle, Canada and California, and had created a countrywide network of information and surveillance. He had even, quite openly, placed barely disguised advertisements in several perfectly respectable papers which, although not in the pay of the Mafia, were happy to see the resulting huge increase in their circulation, thanks to this real-life soap opera. Very soon a phenomenon was observed that had hitherto been unknown on American soil: death squads, or “crime teams” as the
Post
called them, began methodically dividing up the country, visiting the smallest townships, asking questions in the seediest bars, leaving tips and mobile-phone numbers wherever they went. The FBI itself had never come across such a thorough investigation, or such huge means deployed for a single operation. The trackers followed a recognized sequence: two men went into a bar, and put a newspaper on the bar, folded to show a photo of the four Manzonis posing with smiles on their faces at the Newark grand parade. The men didn't need to say anything, or ask any questions; this simple crumpled piece of newspaper was the instant equivalent of a cheque for twenty million dollars.

If the five families were prepared to spend their last cent on the operation, it was because for them it was more a question of survival than one of vengeance. The blow struck by the Manzoni trial had cracked the very foundations of the organization, and threatened a total collapse in the medium term. If one grass could cause such damage, and then escape with the blessing of the court and spend the rest of his days in protected surveillance at the taxpayer's expense, the whole concept of the family, and therefore the Mafia itself, was thrown into question. In the past you joined in blood, and could only leave in blood. And there was Manzoni trampling on his oath of allegiance, lounging in front of the TV, probably with his ass in a swimming pool. Many centuries of secrets and traditions would perish in the face of this image. The Cosa Nostra could not allow its reputation to be sullied like this, leaving the prospect of a disrupted future. In order to prove that it still existed, and intended to stick around, it would have to strike hard: the very survival of the families now depended on the deaths of the Manzonis. And so it happened that the so-called crime teams spread out like a generalized cancer to every urban centre in the country, to remote towns, criss-crossing areas hitherto unvisited even by the census-takers. No local or national authority could prevent this deployment – wandering around a town with a folded newspaper couldn't be said to break any known law. Almost six months after the Blakes' arrival in Cedar City, strangers had been spotted sitting down in a coffee shop in Oldbush, forty-five miles away, holding the famous newspaper and striking up conversations with bored locals.

“Fuck it, can't anything be done to stop them? You're the FBI, Quintiliani, for Christ's sake!”

“Keep calm, Fred.”

“I know them better than you do! And what's more, if I was in their place, and I found the son of a bitch who had done what I've done, I know exactly how I'd take pleasure in wasting him. I'd probably already be behind that door, about to bust us both. I trained some of these guys myself! Your fucking protection programme . . . Six months, that's all it's taken them!”

“. . .”

“Get me out of here. It's your duty, you promised.”

“There's only one solution.”

“Plastic surgery?”

“That wouldn't work.”

“Then what? Pretend I'm dead? They'd never swallow that.”

Fred was right and Quintiliani knew it better than anyone. Ever since Hollywood had taken over that particular script, there was no point faking an informer's death. The Cosa Nostra would only believe in Fred's death once they were faced with a bullet-riddled body.

“You'll have to leave the United States,” Quint said.

“Tell me you're joking.”

“We're living in a cynical age, Giovanni. The whole country is now following this soap opera. It's called
How Long Will the Manzonis Survive?
It's a reality show, and three hundred million viewers are watching.”

“And the end of the show is the end of my family?”

“Europe, Giovanni. Does that word mean anything to you?”

“Europe?”

“Exceptional procedure. Don Mimino's guys can cover this country, but they can't do the whole world. They haven't got any connections in Europe except in Italy. You'll be safe there.”

“You're ready to cross the ocean to save my skin?”