“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?”
“That’s me.”
“Let’s continue: tell me briefly the content of your complaint.”
“My husband and I, my ex-husband even if we aren’t yet legally divorced, his name is Vito Carriglio; well, my husband and I had agreed that he could see them twice a month, Saturday and Sunday. He picked them up last Saturday, at ten in the morning, and today is Wednesday, and I still don’t know anything about him or about my children.”
“What are the children’s names?”
“Giuseppe Carriglio, Salvatore Carriglio, and Costanza Carriglio: twelve, ten, and six years old.”
“Have you gone to look at your husband’s place of residence?”
“Of course.”
Rosaria Savasta shot the human mountain that sat before her an angry glare: you should never question the intelligence of a Sicilian woman. Especially if the woman in question is the daughter of the mob boss Giuseppe Savasta, aka “Tempesta,” and she’s turning to the police, thus breaking one of the most inviolable taboos of Cosa Nostra.
The inspector limited himself to taking notes and translating into bureaucratic jargon the fury that the woman was emitting from her ash-gray eyes. A quarter of an hour later, as the bells of the Arab-Norman cathedral rang out the noon hour, Rosaria Savasta was signing the criminal complaint denouncing the disappearance of her three children. She attached the three photographs she had brought with her, anticipating the request that the police were about to make: the daughter of a mob boss always knows what the police are thinking.
At six that evening the head of the mobile squad, Antonio Gualtieri, confirmed that earlier that day a woman had filed a criminal complaint concerning the disappearance of three minors.
“Are they named Carriglio?” I asked immediately.
Gualtieri said nothing at first.
“How do you know that? Did one of my men tell you about it?”
“It’s an odd story. I received an anonymous phone call.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Come straight over and let’s talk about it.”
The chief of the mobile squad wasn’t interested in commenting on the return to play of the world soccer champions Dino Zoff, Antonio Cabrini, and Paolo “Pablito” Rossi. The game in question was a tougher one.
At 8:30 that evening, after an unspecified number of espressos that would keep me awake until much later that night, we came to the following agreement: I’d tell Gualtieri everything I found out about the case, and he would give me an exclusive account of the actual developments of the investigation. I had a direct line to the anonymous tipster, and my reward for that would be learning everything before the other journalists. I went home feeling satisfied.
Fabrizio was playing his guitar, practicing a piece by Villa-Lobos—a piece that involved an arpeggio that would have sorely tested Houdini. Serena was curled up on the sofa, next to a designer lamp that illuminated her corner of the room: she was reading The Red and the Black. Cicova was roaming around the living room in search of any olfactory trail that might lead to food.
All in all, a quiet, bourgeois setting.
“Where have you been?” Fabrizio asked, halting the motion of his fingers on the strings.
“Police headquarters, something boring.”
Serena lifted her eyes and looked at me.
“That’s good. If it had been something melancholy, you’d be in big trouble,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Listen to what Stendhal has to say.” She sat up straight, with the posture of a radio announcer, and started reading with her soft “r”: “If you are melancholy, it is because you lack something, because you have failed in something. That means showing one’s inferiority; if, on the other hand, you are bored, it is only what has made an unsuccessful attempt to please you, which is inferior.” Then she laughed. “All right, Sicilians, what’s for dinner?”
Villa-Lobos was put away in the guitar case, and I went into the kitchen to open a can of Petreet for Cicova. Then I put a pot of pasta water on to boil.
“Aglio, olio e muddica atturrata,” I shouted, so they could hear me in the living room. Pasta with garlic, olive oil, and toasted breadcrumbs.
“Grazie, journalist,” Serena cried in a loud, clear voice.
“If you want, I’m glad to atturrari la muddica,” said Fabrizio, strolling into the kitchen. It was a matter of slowly toasting some breadcrumbs in a skillet, with a little salt, some olive oil, and, in accordance with a modification I’d made to the recipe two years earlier, a light grating of nutmeg. The breadcrumbs were toasted till they were a dark brown. Then you sprinkled them instead of Parmesan cheese over Tomasello pasta cooked al dente, pasta already flavored with the oil used to sauté, long and low, the garlic and the chopped parsley. I accepted his offer to help. We opened a bottle of Corvo white wine.
After dinner, Simona called. She was a friend of my sister’s, and she wanted me to read the beginning of a novel she’d written. I told her to swing by right away, if she wanted. The first few pages were a little boring, but—luckily—not melancholy. I told her it was really great, and her face lit up. After that we made love, and it was sort of sweet.
The next morning, at a quarter to seven, I made breakfast for everyone: coffee, tea, Stella long-life milk, Oro Saiwa cookies, and an open box of Pavesini cookies. I left three mugs on the kitchen table.
While they were still sleeping, I was back on the hunt for Vito Carriglio. Or at least for his wife.
“What did the head of the mobile squad tell you?”
“We can work together. We have an understandi
ng. They’ll tell us everything they have, and we’ll tell them everything we have.”
“What do you know about these people?”
“She’s the daughter of a guy who’s supposed to be a mob boss. He, the husband, is half a malacarne. A Mafia underling, at the very most.”
“And just how can it be that the daughter of a mob boss is talking to the police?”
“An act of contempt toward her husband. If she’d just turned to her family it would have been normal; setting the police after him, after this half a malacarne, is a terrible punishment.”
“Then get busy. I’d like to publish the first article today.”
The news editor was leafing through the pages of our main rival, a morning paper. An old-fashioned, conventional broadsheet, which everyone in Palermo looked at for obituaries and wedding announcements: the only two objective parameters to measure the success of a media outlet. We were an afternoon paper, smaller in format, more socially engaged, more combative, smarter, and therefore poorer. A Dickensian poverty: proud and honest.
I set out in search of Rosaria Savasta. The chief of the mobile squad had given me a Xerox of the complaint, with all her information. I found Via Ettore li Gotti on the city map.
Acqua dei Corsari. Just a short distance from the seafront along which Via Messina Marine ran, the coast road that every Saturday of my childhood I drove down with my family in our car, my father, my mother, and my sister, to go to our tiny weekend house in Porticello. I remember the rocky beaches and then the garbage along the Statale, the highway, just outside of Palermo. But at the end of that drive, surrounded by orchards of lemon and orange trees, after we’d passed through villages with names that meant nothing to me—Ficarazzi, Ficarazzelli—we’d come to my own private paradise. The tiny house on the water, with the waves crashing beneath the window of the bedroom where my sister and I slept. That was where I learned everything I know about life: how to swim, how to sail a boat, how to fish, how to protect myself from jellyfish, how to spearfish, how to gut a fish, how to kiss a girl on the wave-swept rocks, how to build a strummula—a handmade top that you spin with a length of twine—how to look up at the stars over the water by night, when the lights of the world we lived in, back in the mid-sixties, were so inadequate and faint that they didn’t interfere with the daydreams—or nightdreams—of someone trying to find the constellations.
I climbed aboard my Vespa and headed back down that road.
Via Ettore li Gotti was a U-shaped street that ran from Via Messina Marine back to Via Messina Marine. An elbow lined with unsightly buildings from the fifties. Number 11 was a two-story apartment building with crumbling balconies. There was just one buzzer on the main door, with no name by it. I rang the bell. A woman’s voice asked who I was. I told her my name: I wanted to talk about the three children.
The only answer was silence.
“Signora Savasta, I really do think I could help you.”
The click of the door buzzing open was the final answer.
The whole building belonged to the Savasta-Carriglio family, probably more to the Savasta side than to the Carriglio side.
The staircase smelled of formaldehyde cleaner. The handrail was made of anodized metal. A petite woman with a sharp-edged, angular face was waiting on the upstairs landing. She studied me as I climbed the last steps leading up to the second floor.
“Signora Savasta?”
“Who are you?”
I told her my name a second time, followed by: “I’m a journalist; I know something about the disappearance of your children.”
“Ah”: a sound that might mean Please come in.
The front hall was dark. I walked in and she closed the door.
“Nothing, it’s just a journalist,” she said with a glance toward an adjoining room.
“Ah,” replied the voice of an older woman.
Then Signora Savasta took another look at me, a less suspicious one this time; this look was nothing more than an invitation to join her in the living room.
From the windows you could see the building across the way: taller, uglier. An oil painting of a clown adorned the wall behind an enormous sofa in the Louis Philippe style. The coffee table in front of the sofa was covered with crayon drawings on construction paper. A pencil case lay beside the drawings. A large television set, in the corner, seemed to evoke the evenings that the kids spent watching it.
The woman, with a slight jut and lift of her chin, directed me to have a seat on the fake Louis Philippe sofa.
“Grazie.”
“Now tell me what you know and what you want to find out.”
If she was angular before, she was razor-sharp now.
“Signora Savasta, I’ve received an anonymous phone call about your children.”
“And what did the person say?” she asked without revealing a thing.
“That Vito Carriglio has arranged for his three children to disappear.”
“That’s something I already know.”
“Yes, but the person called before you went to police headquarters.”
“That damned bastard of a husband of mine,” she murmured.
It was starting to dawn on the woman: someone else was in the know.
“Exactly what words did they use?” she asked.
“They said that Vito Carriglio ‘ha fatto scomparsi’ his three children. Disappeared them.”
“Three days ago … Disappeared them …”
The sharp angles of her face had hardened into marble. That expression was a bad sign—disappearing someone is a phrase they use in the “family” to mean …
“Signora, can you tell me what kind of person your husband is?”
“I already told that police inspector from up north. They already knew about him: he’s a fissa. A guy that in my family is considered a mafallannu, someone who doesn’t know how to do anything.”
“And what do you think of him?”
“I belong to my family.”
“But you had three children with somebody like that.”
“These things happen,” she replied, adjusting her taupe skirt.
I didn’t know how to talk her into telling me her story. I understood that she was accustomed to the dominion and silence of power. The daughter of a boss, but married to a fissa: I couldn’t see why she’d chosen to spend her life with a mediocre loser and a coke hound who walked around town in a bulletproof vest.
“And a year ago they shot him. Shot your husband, I mean.”
“Family matters,” she replied.
The voice of the older woman, from the next room, asked: “Did you offer him ’u cafè?”
“No, Assunta.” Rosaria Savasta asked me, “Would you like some?” Adding, after a brief pause: “That’s my elder sister, who is a signorina: she’s come to stay with me since Vito took the children away.”
“No, grazie. Just a little bit of Idrolitina, if you don’t mind.”
“Assunta, the journalist wants bubbly water. My children like it, too.”
Maybe I’d found the first crack in the wall.
“Could you explain to me just what your family is planning to do with Vito?”
“Why should I? Why should I care about you, no offense meant?”
“I might be able to help you: you want to get your children back, and I want to give you a hand. If I find something out, I’ll tell you immediately. And I’d expect the same thing from you. That way, I can print the truth in the newspaper I work for.”
“My husband doesn’t deserve the truth. The truth is for honest people. Someone who steals his children from behind your back is a dishonest coward.”
“While the rest of you, your family, prefer honest people.”
“My father likes real men, not half-men who pull armed robberies in tobacco shops, get drunk, take drugs until they don’t know what they’re doing, half-men who raise their hands to their wives …”
Half-men who raise their hands to their wives, a private and concrete action. L
ike all the actions that marked the code of behavior in the old Cosa Nostra at the end of the seventies: you don’t behave like buffoons, you don’t take drugs, and you don’t beat women. Ever.
She watched me drink the Idrolitina that her sister Assunta had brought me. Assunta was a dried-out old crow with sunken eyes. Rosaria’s expression was neutral. The list that she’d made sounded like a succession of offenses from the criminal code, uttered by a bailiff: a distant tone of resentment, the colorless voice of the law.
“And one day my father just got siddiatu. Fed up, if you follow me.”
“And he had him shot.”
“I never said that.”
“Fine. Someone shot Vito, and after that he went off to live somewhere else.”
“I threw him out of the house myself.”
“But you came to an arrangement for him to see the children.”
“What could I do: he’s still their father, after all.”
“Twice a month.”
“That’s right. He’d come on Saturday morning, they’d go downstairs. And then on Sunday evening they’d come back. I’d ask and they’d say: Papà took us to eat sea urchins, Papà took us to shoot at targets at the fair, Papà bought us cotton candy … I’d ask if he’d done anything odd and they’d tell me that he was always on edge, sweaty, that he wouldn’t tell them anything, but he’d always buy them something.”
“Had you had any fights recently?”
“Yes, one night. In front of the children. I told him that he couldn’t bring them back home to me in that condition: filthy, their clothes a mess, dropping with exhaustion. He told me to keep my mouth shut or he’d kill me. He even slapped me twice in the face, with the children staring at us. Then he left.”
“Did you tell your father?”
“What else could I do? Two weeks later, when he came home with the children, my father was here waiting for him. And he said terrible things to Vito, in a calm voice: that Vito wasn’t a man, that no one should behave like that, that if he kept behaving that way, then …”
“Then what?”
The Four Corners of Palermo Page 10
