One of our boys took the floor. There was, he said, an absolutely pre-eminent preliminary matter that had to be addressed with regard to the case. A very recent ruling by the Constitutional Court had recognized the conflict of interest of anyone who had in any way evaluated the initial detention order in a judicial capacity. Whoever had issued the defendant’s warrant for arrest or rejected their request for bail, assuming the accusations were meaningful, could not serve as a judge in the defendant’s trial, having already demonstrated their bias regarding their guilt.
The presiding judge deemed the question worthy of exploring, and postponed the hearing, having no immediate access to the text of the Court’s ruling, nor the proof that any panel members had expressed prognostic judgments of guilt.
Our lawyer, red in the face, requested the floor. He noted that one of the defendants was in possession of the text in question.
Luciano was authorized to hand over a folder he had brought with him to the clerk, who came to the front of the cage to collect it. He’d had the prison prepare copies for the prosecution, the defense, and the judges.
Everyone read attentively. The prosecutor opposed the acceptance of the text, given its unofficial origins. Our lawyers insisted that the evidence be admitted. The panel withdrew and came back with a Solomonic—and intelligent—decision: the documents weren’t admitted, and the prosecutor’s request was accepted. But one of the three judges on the panel noted his conflict of interest and recused himself from the case.
The trial was postponed pending the foregone acceptance of the judge’s recusal by the Court of Appeal and for his substitution to be arranged.
One month later we found ourselves standing before a new panel of judges, and in the place of the previous judge we found a heart-stopping blonde. Her face betrayed her suffering; the dark circles under her eyes told of her sleepless nights. It was Chiara, poor Santoro’s wife.
Another case was called first, then ours. The young lawyers approached Luciano and everyone watched the scene unfold, concealing their curiosity.
Luciano began the consultation. I, who had no role in the matter, dedicated myself to the only thing that interested me: Giulia, who sat among the public.
I embraced her gaze and we conducted a silent dialogue that would continue until the end of the hearing. I heard the judges and lawyers in the distance. The court opened the proceedings for our case, the useless procedural skirmishes instigated by our defense team to demonstrate their mastery of the doctrine were soon overturned, and the hearing began. The prosecutor requested a reading of the indictments and the admission of evidence. The defense noted a few witnesses and made their more serious requests.
They stated that the defendants had always maintained their innocence, claiming that someone had hidden the drugs in their car to frame them. It emerged that the accusations were exclusively found in the declarations made by the arresting officers. It would be useful to engage a court expert who could detect fingerprints to establish who the drugs belonged to, they said. It would also be useful to acquire telephone records of calls made to headquarters in the hours before the arrest.
The prosecutor became cyanotic; his reply was venomous. The defense was questioning the honesty of our faithful public servants.
The back-and-forth that followed was exhaustive, Luciano making continuous suggestions while Giulia and I traveled off together to other worlds.
The panel entered the council chamber to deliberate.
A few hours passed before the bell announced their return. The battle lines were drawn on the faces of the judges who sat on either side of the presiding judge.
The requests of the defense are accepted, Chiara ceded.
A handful of simple referral hearings were held, and after a few months the trial heated up. Our fingerprints hadn’t been found on any of the packages, and in fact the last people to handle them had used gloves. Phone records of incoming calls revealed one in particular that warned the police about a large cocaine stash in a car. The license plate, color, and type of car were indicated, along with the street where it was parked. The voice had a strong Arabic inflection.
The grinning policemen who had arrested us sat down one at a time before the court. In their testimonies they’d claimed that the operation had been the result of laborious investigations that had taken months, aimed at monitoring our movements from opposite our apartment on via Spartaco and trailing our car.
Our lawyers demonstrated, through witnesses and documents, that the house and the car had been in use by us, the defendants, for less than a week. The witnesses for the prosecution left the courtroom in a daze.
After a few more months, we lodged our final requests: full acquittal, our representatives demanded. Despite the evidence that had emerged, the public prosecutor insisted on our conviction. But his request was meeker, and he suggested that the standard twenty-four year sentence be reduced by one third, in the interest of a shorter trial, which had been requested but not granted at the preliminary hearing. A total of sixteen years in jail. It was nothing.
Giulia looked at me in despair, burst into tears, and ran out of the courtroom. There was a buzz from the audience, to which some of our escorting officers also contributed. The presiding judge silenced everyone. The panel withdrew to deliberate.
The judges’ faces announced the ruling before they did. The presiding judge was impenetrable, as usual. The judge to his left was livid, and Chiara was radiant: article 530, paragraph two, acquittal. Under the old ordinance, this meant insufficient evidence, the only concession the judges had made to the prosecution.
We returned to our cell on our leashes for the last time. We placed the belongings that had accompanied us for those two years in black trash bags; according to prison superstition, we got rid of anything that could bring bad luck.
We said goodbye to the few boys who had been our friends and went out into the evening.
A light autumn rain greeted us, as did Gino, Giulio, Tonino, Ciccio, and Giulia. A little world of people who loved us.
We ate in a trattoria for truck drivers outside Milan. Our heads were spinning; we couldn’t stand all the noises.
People on the inside don’t think they’ve left the real world, they think they know how things and people are on the outside. But once you’re out you realize that everything moves so fast, at twice the speed. You have to catch up slowly, and for a few months you sleep on a cot like the one where you spent so many nights. You wake up thinking you can hear the sound of bars.
The others stayed with some of Tonino’s friends who were still in the area. I went to Giulia’s.
We didn’t speak. We were one, she followed my lead and didn’t ask questions.
After a few days, we cautiously sought out Anna and Chiara. They showered us with a thousand warm greetings and bits of advice before they’d even let us through their front door; they, too, were a part of our world.
We hung around Milan for a while. The joy, the desire to feel alive that had filled the city before—it had all vanished. Now, the Milanese lived as shut-ins. The outside world made them more and more afraid. The paladins once they’d praised had delivered a heap of trash instead of the new future they’d promised.
We left it behind us, that past that could no longer return. We drove south to the mountain kingdom of Stefano Bennaco and his family. We were safe there.
We resumed contact with our land and our people; our minds began to function normally again, by our standards.
In the mountain village of our countryside, there were about ten houses, but only four or five families, all related. It was where the last goatherds lived, survivors of the progress the outsiders had tried to force on us.
Back in the village, Luciano avoided drinking, because when he drank he grew spiteful, and until the fumes of alcohol evaporated along with the demon that possessed him, he would repeat the same speec
h endlessly, to anyone and everyone.
“When we lived among ourselves we were a quiet people, everyone played a role, we respected shared rules, we helped one another. Each of us had his own territory, of which he was the absolute master; he decided where to graze, where to set up the fold, where to grow crops, where to cut trees, where to raze the land, he did whatever he pleased. Anyone who invaded someone else’s territory knew what he was up against and accepted the consequences. He would pay for his mistakes; first and foremost, his own family would hold him accountable. Once upon a time, we had very few and certain rules, printed from our genetic code. The masters of our world, the pagan gods and the Holy Father, had handed them down to us, telling Kyria how to lead the way. We wanted to live in peace, to watch over our herds. The Greeks arrived to destroy our paradise and from then on we decided to live in hell to repel other greedy conquerors. Only God’s army had come in peace, in the form of the solitary and pious Basilian monks. The Bourbons came looking for us in order to impose their tariffs and rules, and they created an army of Blood Brothers to subdue us from the inside. The Savoy followed them, allowing the gangsters to carry on and introducing new tariffs and new rules. The Black Shirts arrived to annex us for the Empire to which Italy was entitled, and we got a taste of their batons and castor oil. The Republic sent us out into the world to break our backs for a piece of bread. They needed manpower to fuel their progress and depopulated our mountains, by force or by enticing us with money and the mirage of a better life. Only in our forests could we be normal people; out of our habitat, we were like beasts in captivity, wild animals foaming at the mouth. What did they expect to do, tame us? They came looking for us, not the other way around. We were happy with our black bread, our hunger, our diseases, our backward ways; we didn’t want their help. They came to our pastures to hang up signs prohibiting hunting, prohibiting fishing, prohibiting grazing, prohibiting everything that made us free. Why couldn’t a thousand-year-old people be allowed to choose their own way of life on their own land? We didn’t want their integration, their progress, their language, their money. They opened the door to the devil.”
Luciano could have burnt the world down in those moments. “What did I say?” he would always ask the next morning. “Nothing. They were the ones who started it,” I would answer. Then he would laugh and become his usual self again.
We were back in our mountains, free again. We weren’t kids anymore. We’d been plotting thefts and murders for years. We wouldn’t stop until we hit a wall.
Now it was the Blood Brothers’ turn. Traitors to their own people, sell-outs to the established order. In the mountains, we could speak freely about our plans, unlike in jail, with the cameras and bugs everywhere.
I shared my observations with Luciano, and we agreed.
Yussuf had continued to send letters this whole time, letters which always ended with a maxim or a verse from the Koran or the Bible. Those closing phrases contained a hidden message. Luciano was able to decipher them easily. The most important ones read: The best father goes crazy if possessed by the demon of power, he comes to kill children who do not support him, and Cain followed Satan and left his brother to die.
The father was the head of their faction, the source of the evil. He had mowed down everyone who stood in the way of our annihilation.
With our decision to stop trafficking after one last trip, we had signed our own death warrants. Everything had to proceed at all costs, and Luciano and I had become obstacles to the cash flow he’d been enjoying for years, the fruits of our labor. The Arabs he’d sent to kill us hadn’t had the guts to take us out, remembering the risks we’d taken to save Yussuf. Instead, they’d planted drugs in our car and called the police as a way of sparing us. They paid for it with their lives.
We had a clear picture of the situation in our heads. Tonino’s men informed us that the same stuff we used to distribute around Milan was still in circulation. The Arab leader, after eliminating Alfio, Santoro, and Natalia, had reeled in Sasà and Luigi after they’d escaped arrest, and he’d somehow convinced them to keep working. Down south, Zacco took advantage of the opportunity and delivered his blow. If he’d succeeded in full, the plan would have wiped us out forever.
That was our theory.
It was all confirmed by what we knew about Zacco: Don Peppino hadn’t let up; one of Tonino’s boys who had infiltrated his ranks said he’d lost his mind with rage at our sentencing. “Those bastards, out after two years. What kind of fucking justice is this? With all those drugs they should have gotten thirty, and now they’re free to cook up more tragedies. We have to make the first move.”
Zacco wanted to hit us first, but we didn’t let him.
We each wore an earpiece connected to a transceiver. We were sitting in two separate cars, tucked away on a path hidden by a high cane thicket a hundred yards from the highway. Tonino was driving one car, with Luciano at his side, while I sat in the back.
Giulio drove the car ahead of us, carrying Ciccio and Gino. I imagined them joking around and listening to all the hits on the radio. The three boys were carefree in the face of death.
Our friend gave us the go: “Blue follows red.” There were two cars, and Zacco was in the blue one.
We reached the intersection and let them pass.
They were speeding, on their way to a meeting with other bosses from neighboring villages.
The boys passed them, flanked the red car and opened fire. At the same time, Luciano let loose on the occupants in the front seats of the blue car. I was about to do the same to Don Peppino, but I stopped myself. We got out of our cars and shot each bodyguard in the head.
Don Peppino got out quietly, turned his back to us, and said, “Make it fast, you little shits.”
We shot him with gusto, reloading and unloading so many times we would have had to scoop up his body with a shovel. When Giulio and Ciccio arrived, they joined in the massacre. I went to stop them and Luciano blocked me. “Leave it,” I read on his lips.
Stefano, stationed a few miles ahead of us, warned us that the patrols were on their way. We calmly climbed back into our cars and slipped onto the mountain road.
“Why?” I asked Luciano, as we were driving. He turned to look at me. I didn’t need to finish my question. He knew I was referring to the boys; he had wanted them to shoot at Zacco, too.
“Do you remember Don Vincenzo’s memoirs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you remember how many strips of paper I kept?”
“Uh-huh.”
“This is the third,” he said, handing it to me.
Don Peppino Zacco reported to me on the death of engineer Bonasira, I read.
I rolled up the strip and put it in my mouth. Giulio and Ciccio Bonasira didn’t need to know about their father; they could continue to rail against him for having abandoned them to go mess around who knows where. I thought about keeping it from Minna, too, so she could still enjoy the sympathy she received for having been abandoned.
Luciano and I had been working on that act of revenge for years, and perhaps for our whole lives. It had just been the two of us, we hadn’t told a soul, not even Sasà or Luigi. In chasing after the money, Zacco had gotten a head start on us, but now we’d overtaken him. We’d spent years training a group of boys, helping them, giving them loads of money. Recently, we’d brought Tonino into the plan, and he’d managed the boys after our arrest. At our behest, many of them had joined the Blood Brothers, even though they each had an account to settle with them. They showed their gratitude up to the end, informing us of everything they saw or heard.
After Zacco’s death we only touched the most dangerous leaders and assassins. They were our enemies; they’d brought death to our doors.
Don Santino Cozza was one of Zacco’s most loyal allies; he had a healthy cohort made up of very close relatives. After the death of his friend, he’d barricaded himsel
f in his home to plot his bloody response, surrounding himself with impenetrable security measures. He lived in a kind of fort with high walls, cameras, and ferocious dogs to guard the grounds. Access was limited to his brother’s sons, who served as his guards, and to his young wife. Occasionally he received one of his young soldiers, who would be permitted to enter alone after a careful search made by Cozza’s nephews. He lived on the ground floor, and the windows were barred.
After a month of useless stakeouts, we postponed our ambush, waiting for the defensive mesh to loosen.
Giulio, Ciccio, and Gino, however, had gotten a little carried away; they knew our objectives and often acted in anticipation of our orders. They belonged to a more reckless generation than ours when it came to death and managed to outdo us, which was no easy feat.
They studied Don Santino and identified his weaknesses. Cozza was about fifty years old, and had become a widower a few years before, when leukemia had taken away the mother of his two daughters. The latter, already married, didn’t live with him. To remedy his loneliness he allowed himself to stretch the honored society’s rules, bringing a young Romanian woman home to keep him company. Lorenza was from Craiova, a large city in Romania. She had landed in Turin searching for good luck, and ended up in a nightclub run by one of Cozza’s men. Before the customers could enjoy her, Don Santino offered her wads of cash and brought her home with him to occupy his empty bridal chamber.
Beautiful women abounded in the village, but none of them were six-foot-tall redheads with green eyes. Lorenza was a rock in a stagnant pond; the boss fell madly in love with her and naturally became incredibly jealous.
Despite the terror that Cozza inspired, it was difficult for any man to resist the temptation of glancing at that supernatural creature. Several went further, venturing a compliment to the diva; and in this way, from time to time, some daring young man would disappear without a trace.
But for all the Don’s power and imposing personality, he was defenseless against his statuesque Romanian, who often left the compound at the godfather’s behest. Don Santino required her to go shopping alone every morning, because the boss didn’t even trust his own nephews when it came to the meat. She always left in a huge armored jeep, draped in a dark coat that reached her ankles and wearing sunglasses big enough to hide her face, with a headscarf knotted over her dazzling copper hair. Of the shops along the coast, the last, obligatory stop was Pasquale Panazza’s bakery. At precisely half past twelve, the baker wrapped up her bread, hot out of the traditional wood oven that he fired with olive branches. The lady wouldn’t have it prepared any other way.
Black Souls Page 16
