The Four Corners of Palermo (14 page)

Vito’s family didn’t want to see new things, because it was sealed in an emotional sarcophagus: a grave-like existence made up of rigid borders, dull anger, and misguided loves
.

“City newsroom?”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“A man named Vito Carriglio
ha fatto scomparsi
—has
disappeared
—his three children.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Makes no difference. You write that down?”

My pen was scratching spastically across the notepad. First I wrote
Carriglio
. Then, under that,
Vito
. With my doctor’s handwriting, the words looked like a sketch by Jackson Pollock.

“So, you wrote it down?”

“Yes, but …”

Click
.

The man had a voice like a dried walnut: hard and wrinkled.

I stood up and went to see my boss.

“An anonymous phone tip, called in in a fine Sicilian accent, reports three children gone missing and accuses the father, a certain Vito Carriglio.”

The news editor was stirring his third espresso of the afternoon in a heavy porcelain demitasse: five stirs, six stirs, seven stirs. He was looking at me but said nothing. Eight stirs, nine stirs. I remember reading once that the stirring motion of a cup of espresso can prove hypnotic to some: an
American actor, working at Cinecittà, once stirred his coffee forty-one times, later explaining that the act of stirring had given him a sense of perfection. He drank his espresso cold. The director had been satisfied with the emotional depth of his performance.

But now the news editor stopped stirring.

“So?”

“So what, boss?” I asked, intimidated.

“Have you checked with the archives? Have you talked to the police?”

“No, but—”

“Then why are you standing here busting my balls? Check out the tip and then we’ll have something to talk about. There are crazy people everywhere, never forget that.”

Good point. Still, that voice like a dried walnut told me that something must have happened.

I phoned down to the archives. Annamaria Florio answered the phone. She was a Marxist-Leninist militant in her forties, and on her days off she stood outside the lobby door of the newspaper, selling copies of
Armare il Popolo
, an insurrectional publication that was usually printed out of register. I’d occasionally buy a copy because she was a friend, but I was pretty sure all the same that the revolution was destined to fail because of defective printing.

“Anna, do you happen to know if we have anything on a certain Vito Carriglio?”

“Hold on. Carriglio, double ‘r’…”

I could hear the rustling of the manila folders that contained newspaper clippings and photographs.

“Caronia, Carotenuto, Carraro … ah, here it is: Carriglio. There’s nothing here but a photograph. I’ll send it up.”

Five minutes later a newspaper messenger boy set an envelope down on my desk. I pulled out the photograph. It showed an overweight man, about forty, on his back in a hospital bed, laughing as he held up a bulletproof vest for the photographer to see, as if it were a trophy. His right leg and left arm had been bandaged. There was something buffoonish about his face. He looked as if he was trying to ridicule someone or something.

On the back of the photograph was written: “Vito Carriglio—Ospedale Buccheri la Ferla—October 1982.” Underneath that was the stamped name of the photographer, Filippo Lombardo. And the logo of the newspaper.

Up on the fifth floor were the offices our photographers worked out of. Filippo was their chief, a man who roamed the city incessantly, bearing witness to the essence of this slaughterhouse of a city of ours with the direct power of pictures. Murders took place in the street, and then they wound up on one of his negatives. Or else they’d never been committed.

I called his extension.

“Filippo, my lad, do you remember a guy named Carriglio? You took his picture last year.”

“Wait, who?”

“It was at the hospital, at the Ospedale Buccheri la Ferla, he’d been shot and he had a bulletproof vest.”

“An ugly customer. I remember him.”

“Then come on down and tell me all about him.”

Filippo picked up the photograph and tapped the nail of his right middle finger on it.

“This one is
tinto
, dark and evil,” he said, “the genuine article.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing. He didn’t want to tell anybody anything, not even the police, but he had no problems with having his picture taken. I asked if he’d show us the bulletproof vest that saved his life. He was laughing and his eyes looked like he was on cocaine: he picked up the vest and I took the picture.”

“Did they shoot him in the body?”

“No, they intentionally hit him in the legs and arms. But I did find out one thing: he told a male nurse that for days he’d been wearing that vest around his neighborhood. If I’m not misremembering, he was from Acqua dei Corsari. Can you just see it, someone wandering around on the streets in front of his apartment building, strolling by the seaside, in that getup?”

“You might take him for a nut.”

“But then they shoot him, turns out he’s not a nut. Anything but, in fact.”

“Yeah, but if they’d been out to kill him, they would have shot him in the head.”

Filippo gave me a look and started fooling around with the focus ring on his Nikon FM2.

“Legs and arms. That was a warning.”

He’d focused clearly.

I went back to my news editor and told him about the shooting and the impressions that Filippo conveyed to me. I repeated his words: “An ugly customer.” My boss told me to talk to the police and keep working on it.

The first thing to do was find out whether, by any chance, a missing persons report for three children had been lodged in
the past few days. I decided to call the head of the mobile squad, Antonio Gualtieri, a cop from up north, Turin, who’d come down to Palermo two years earlier. We—journalists, investigators, medical examiners, press photographers—had achieved a sort of symbiosis: we’d see one another at crime scenes and exchange rapid greetings and remarks, communications in code, comrades in arms swapping minor confidences. Gualtieri was a short, tough man, disinclined to camaraderie, with the manners of a K9 Corps dog trainer. At first glance, a man to be afraid of, not a man with whom you’d want to establish symbiosis of any kind; but shift the topic to the Juventus soccer team, and Gualtieri would melt like a granita in the summer heat on Lipari. And ever since Unione Sportiva Città di Palermo, the city’s soccer team, had sunk out of major league sight and was on the verge of dropping to the depths of Serie C, Palermo had been rooting for the Old Lady, Juventus. As a result, even the grim Gualtieri felt at home. Like a granita on Lipari.

I checked my watch. There would be time to check out those details later. I threw on my fatigue jacket, kick-started my Vespa, and buzzed home to see Cicova, Fabrizio, and his new girlfriend, Serena, who’d just flown down from Milan that afternoon.

I opened the door and the scent of
pasta con i broccoli arriminati
—pasta with cauliflower sauce—washed over me. Fabrizio didn’t cook that often, but when he set himself to it he reminded me that divinity could be found hiding in even a simple sauté.

Serena came to greet me, throwing her arms around my neck.

“
Ciao
, journalist.”

Her eyes glowed in the dim light of the front hall. They were dark and luminous, a rare case of pure oxymoron, with long lashes. Serena had a physical impact on the world: she touched people, she attracted attention, she looked at people decisively, she didn’t mind people brushing against her. Her voice, made up of broad vowel sounds and a Lombard drawl, was softened by her pseudo-French “r.” She embodied all the best things about a northern Italy that to us was as distant as Andromeda, far away and mythical. Among its inhabitants, Fabrizio and I were for the most part acquainted with the female offspring, the young women who passed through Palermo on their holidays and often, in those days and in those years, in those half hours, found themselves biting into a cinnamon and Chantilly rice
pezzo duro
Da Ilardo, under the Passeggiata delle Cattive, some of the finest gelato available.

We were living the carefree lives of people in their twenties, immersed in a city that was methodically going about committing suicide.

“
Ciao
, art historian,” I replied.

Our embrace dissolved slowly, giving us both all the time we needed to explore each other’s backs and shoulders, inch by inch. I hadn’t seen her for a month. I loved her dearly: she was my best friend’s new girlfriend.

We had met that summer on Vulcano, on the Sables Noirs, the obsidian beach on the west side of the island. Serena was on holiday with her two girlfriends, while Fabrizio and I were taking a short break during a working August: I was busy describing corpses; Fabrizio was reviewing various subjects in preparation for overview exams.

The only brunette of the three women was Serena, and she was also the prettiest. With the nicest smile, and the most attractive tan. The finest topless. Valentina and Alba, her two blonde, blue-eyed friends, vied to make friends with me: neither of them was forced to concede defeat. Serena aimed straight at Fabrizio’s heart. She, too, emerged victorious. Those ten days on Vulcano left a decisive mark in the emotional pavement of our lives.

“Where have you been, girl of the north?”

“Home. With my folks. But now I’m going to stay with you guys until Christmas.”

“And your exams?”

“They’re in February. Seventeenth-century art. Applied arts. Studying down here is like getting extra summer: Fabrizio, you, the warmth in the air …”

Cicova had come over and was rubbing against my legs. Demanding attention. Serena leaned down to stroke him. He started stretching, his whole body purring.

“Let’s go see the cook,” she said.

I tossed my fatigue jacket on one of the sandalwood chairs that adorned the front hall and followed her into the kitchen.

“I want to file a criminal complaint.”

“Theft?”

“Theft of children.”

The patrolman standing guard at police headquarters sized up the petite woman looking up at him. He noticed her decidedly unfriendly eyes.

“Third floor. Complaints office. You’ll find one of my colleagues; tell him that this isn’t about cars or jewelry.”

He adjusted his regulation cap and the knot of his tie. He wasn’t sure what kind of reaction to expect. The woman went on looking at him, expressionless. She was dressed in a nondescript manner: a light cotton jacket, dark brown, over a beige skirt, low-heeled shoes, taupe-gray stockings. Her face looked as if it had been sketched by a Cubist painter: all angles, with thin lips, ash-gray eyes, and an aquiline nose.

“All right,” she said. “Third floor.”

A young policeman with a Roman accent greeted the woman with a distracted “How can I help you?” uttered in a vaguely questioning tone.

“I’m here to report that my ex-husband has taken my three children and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Go see Inspector Zoller: down that hall, first office on your right.”

The woman knocked on the door.

A weary “Come in” authorized the woman to open the door.

Inside was a man in civilian clothing, about 225 pounds, with an enormous salt-and-pepper mustache. “What’s this about?”

“I’m here to report the disappearance of my children. I think that my husband has taken them.”

Inspector Zoller pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and mopped his forehead. October at the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude was like August at the forty-seventh parallel: he knew it, he’d always known it, they’d explained it to him in his geography classes, but rediscovering it every year, after twenty years of duty in Palermo, always caused a certain annoyance.

“Sit down and give me some ID.”

The woman opened a patent-leather handbag with a fake gold clasp. She pulled out her identity card. The inspector read aloud: “Savasta, Rosaria, born in Palermo on June 27, 1953, residing, also in Palermo, at Via Ettore li Gotti, 11. Do you confirm?”