The Four Corners of Palermo (11 page)

“They don’t pay much, but at least …” She never finished her sentence, because I took her hand and kissed it. She repaid the gesture by opening her eyes wide in a look of flattered surprise at finding my lips on her fingers.

“Let’s go,” she implored.

We paid a reasonable amount for an open-air bistro with paper tablecloths and waiters who asked you: “What’ll it be for dessert, comrade?”

It wasn’t easy to explain to her, as we left, that for some people it would always be 1968.

The newspaper was buzzing with activity. It was 7:30 in the morning, I had no coffee in my bloodstream, and I’d
left Sophie still sleeping in the sheets, damp from the night before. It had finally cooled down just before dawn, when my alarm clock had already begun its countdown. I chose to let her sleep, moving as quietly as a cat that wants something; I threw on any old clothes, that is, the same clothes I usually wore, jeans and a light-colored shirt. I put on my Ray-Bans, grabbed cigarettes, watch, and Vespa keys, and went out the door, leaving the most interesting part of me in that bed next to a girl who, with every square inch of her body, asked me, in her sleep, to stay.

“Sleepy eyes,” Saro ribbed me as he usually did when he saw me arrive at the paper. The smile on my face and my wobbly drunkard’s gait were both glaring admissions of the facts. I replied: “That’s right, my friend, sexy eyes. Worse: the eyes of someone who’s in love.”

My emotional hangover evaporated on the spot when I stepped into the city newsroom. My boss gave me a scathing glance that lasted three or four thousandths of a second: the longest glance I’d ever received in my life. What had happened? What did he want from me? I could hear three fellow journalists on the phone asking various contacts questions. “Where? The ring road?”

“When, exactly?”

“Just who found the armory?”

“Have you seen the serial numbers?”

My boss waved me over. I hadn’t even reached my desk.

“Explosives,”
he exclaimed, as if he were saying
Buon giorno
.

“Weapons! Get going! As fast as you can! A Mafia arms dump, a veritable armory; there are rifles and submachine
guns, half a metric ton of TNT, packets of C4 just like the ones used for the car bomb, semi-automatic pistols. It’s the Mafia’s entire arsenal. Fuck, get moving!”

He forgot to tell me where; an insignificant detail, an oversight that should never discourage a competent beat reporter. “Where” is something you can always find out; it’s the “why” that’s harder to track down.

“I’m on my way. When I get there I’ll give you a call. I’ve got plenty of phone tokens; I just hope there’s a phone booth.”

He shot me one last glance of pity as he tried to calm his nerves by sipping his third triple espresso of the morning, so strong that the sugar wouldn’t even sink to the bottom. I galloped down the stairs two steps at a time, and then went back to the doorman’s enclosure, where Saro informed me: “Ring road, near the exit for Ciaculli.”

I got back on my Vespa. I buzzed out into a Palermo August in the hot year of 1983, already filled to the brim with adrenaline at 7:30 in the morning.

Over the next two hours, Sophie shrank in importance to the level of a character out of a book, a literary figure light-years away from the narrative of things that were happening around me, the creation of another author’s pen, in another era, in another novel.

I handled the emotions of policemen with cocaine-crazed eyes, I saw the thirst for vengeance in the eyes of their chiefs and superior officers, I held an Uzi submachine gun in my hands, I learned the difference between a Thompson submachine gun with a standard barrel and a double-barreled over-under sawed-off shotgun. Truth be told, I didn’t really understand anything much; I limited myself to drafting a
journalistic account of a major find. That’s what those years were like: we kept spreadsheets of death, weapons, and none of us were really expected to uncover anything. Investigative journalism was a figure of speech in Sicily in the early eighties. It was a place where Hammett’s red harvest really was a bumper crop of blood.

That afternoon I got home, exhausted.

The boiserie was deserted. Sophie had left me a note in French, telling me that she was going back to work for that retailer, at a photo shoot for a catalog.

She showed up at eight o’clock, with a faraway look in her eyes. She gave me a kiss, accompanied by a limp hug, and told me that she was exhausted. All she wanted was a “room temperature” bath. Her skin was luminous, in spite of the fact that Palermo’s heat had melted her makeup. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever had eight inches from my heart.

I waited on her hand and foot for fifteen minutes, helping her to put away the clothes and makeup that she’d brought with her for test shots, then I left her alone in the bathtub, immersed in her weariness, in this new, unfamiliar mood.

She emerged half an hour later. She asked me about Fabrizio, did I really want to go out to dinner? I told her no, we could listen to music at home.

“Then help me to relax for real.”

She begged me to read her French poetry, saying that she found my Italian accent sexy. She chose the poems of Verlaine, the same poems that her mother used to read to her, in Paris, in their apartment in the nineteenth arrondissement.

She pulled a book out of her bag. I opened it at random. Spleen. I began to read.

The enchantment of the first day, the first night, the senseless magic of a shared, starry sky: a phantom that materialized then and there, in Verlaine’s poetry, sending a shiver down my spine. I, too, feared some killing blow.

Sophie fell asleep a short while later. I listened to her breathing: I could spend the rest of my life inside of her.

The days that followed were a time of nerve-racking routine for me and for her, of
spleen à la façon de Verlaine
. She went out with Elena, who called me afterward to ask me how things were going with Sophie.

“I don’t know, we’re still making love, but there are moments when she’s just not there. That girl …”

“I know; that girl has some black upholstery.”

She used a metaphor from the world of car interiors, and I silently shared her point. We said goodbye, promising to get together soon, the four of us, including Paolo, who was fighting day by day his senseless war against adulthood.

We were growing up; we were strong and weak, each to different degrees. Probably Sophie had the highest scores in both rankings.

Handguns and rifles have always played an important role in my life. My grandfather had a gun shop in the historic district of Palermo, just a short walk from the Borsa, or stock exchange, one of the most magnificent and venerable gun shops in the city. When I was a child, every November 2, on the Day of the Dead, he’d give me an air pistol or an air rifle. I’ve never had a taboo about weapons: I look at them, I caress them, but I don’t own them. I grew up with the convictions of a pacifist ready to pull the trigger. I believe that many policemen and carabinieri feel the same way
.

In that Mafia armory, where my news editor at the time sent me, I was greeted by the sense of excitement of the officers under the leadership of Commissario Beppe Montana, a young man, intelligent and impassioned. Montana had a feverish gaze, crouching in that culvert that ran under the Palermo-Messina highway, as he was helping his men to pull out the arsenal. We filmed the process with television cameras, and he was happy to let us: in fact, he was a happy man that day. It was a harsh blow to Cosa Nostra; weapons were uncovered that had been used to murder mob bosses and picciotti, but also policemen and judges
.

Commissario Montana then went on to lead the Squadra Catturandi, a select team of Mafia-hunters operating inside the mobile squad. He didn’t lead it long: on July 28, 1985, on a muggy summer afternoon, he was cut down by two killers sent by the Corleonese outside a shipyard in Porticello, a dozen miles from
Palermo. He’d gone for a drive with his fiancée and a couple of friends. He was thirty-four years old
.

“I ran away from Paris. There was a boy who was making my life a living hell … Yes, it’s true, I studied under Béjart in Brussels, I paid for the course with a year’s worth of savings: I had worked on two major campaigns, for Jean Patou and Kenzo. My mother told me that I just had to watch out for men, they all think that models are human beings in a display case, souls for sale … she hates the people you encounter in my line of work, especially the ones who buzz around the outskirts. There was one I remember, the assistant to a renowned photographer, an incredibly handsome young man from Lyons, who had just moved to Paris. You know the kind of guy I mean, with dark curly hair and a perpetual scowl? I liked him, he courted me the whole time we were shooting for Jean Patou, he asked me out to dinner, I accepted the invitation, and I accepted the consequences.”

That night Sophie talked, curled up on the sofa, while the stereo played a Bowie album she liked as much as I did—
Hunky Dory
, one of the Thin White Duke’s masterpieces. She was eager to tell me her story, to try to fit together pieces of the puzzle. A fashion model in Palermo: clearly out of place.

“Meeting Elena was fun, and it allowed me to get away from him. I found him relentless, his insecurity, his jealousy, his insistence on being the center of attention every single night. I was just doing my best to work hard, find a little scrap of security. And I was succeeding, but I had to get away from him. An English model I confided in heard that I loved dance, and she mentioned this school of Béjart’s. I decided to take
a little time off, do a three-month course, and in May I ran away from Paris. That was where I met Elena, and after that it was easy to come down to Sicily. I knew that there was a city here called Cefalù, where they have one of the most fashionable Club Meds on earth, and we French think of Club Med as a little piece of heaven.”

I let her talk; I asked no questions. She was different from her usual self. She was loose, she was stroking my hand with the intimacy of a girlfriend, then she lit one of my Camels, and every now and then she’d kiss me, pressing her lips against mine, as if she were getting away with something. Furtive, light. Then she’d laugh.

I’d never seen Sophie that way. I sort of liked it, though in some corner of my mind, something imperceptible, an object out of place in the background, caught my eye. Too many words, certain unfamiliar gestures, her relaxed, jovial tone of voice, nothing in common with the girl steeped in seduction, wrapped in mystery. I imagined French disappointments in a metro station, abandonments, the emptiness of a missing father, and the fullness of a mother absent by necessity. Working in a Paris that to me was legendary but to her was the red zone of suffering. Then her work, the certainty that she was desired, frank and open sex, and finally running headlong to escape from an obsessed man. Coming to Sicily was like catching a ride, out hitchhiking on the highway of life.