The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  “I’m ready.”

  “I’ll tell them that you’re my paralegal. They don’t know you at the prison, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well then, at eleven o’clock, in front of the loading dock on Via Enrico Albanese.”

  “At eleven it is.”

  I swung by the paper and notified my boss of the appointment to visit the prison. I told him to set aside plenty of space: I was sure this was going to be a scoop. After the meeting in the prison, I’d alert the head of the mobile squad. I read the morning papers absentmindedly and sat out the planning of the day’s issue: all I could think about was Vito Carriglio’s sweaty face that night in the Ficuzza forest, his cocaine eyes, and the words he’d shouted: “Journalists! I need to talk to you guys!” I jotted down the mental notes I’d taken during my conversation with Rosaria Savasta. I built up a small outline on the sheet of paper:

  Motive: Vito’s anger.

  Target: her family.

  Weapon: the three children.

  I reread that last line: I felt a wave of shame. For myself and for him. How can three innocent lives become the tools of a vendetta?

  I crumpled up the sheet of paper and tossed it in the trash.

  I went back to my notes about Rosaria, that proclamation of hers: “Vito Carriglio doesn’t deserve the truth.” It was probably a fair statement, but her children did. The truth was waiting for me in the Ucciardone prison visiting room, and I’d be there in two hours.

  I parked my Vespa on the sidewalk, on Via Enrico Albanese. The prison guards watched the process with an air of indifference. I stood close to the prison wall near the guards’ booth and waited for Counselor Gallina. I’d brought a leather briefcase that I’d borrowed from a fellow journalist, hoping to make myself look professional.

  “What’s in the bag?” the lawyer asked as he approached with an indolent swagger.

  I opened the briefcase and found a copy of Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Other Stories, the September issue of Quaderni Piacentini, a Diabolik comic book, a ChapStick, and an eyeglass case.

  “Can I take it in with me?”

  “It doesn’t look like the kinds of things a lawyer would carry. If they ask to look inside, tell them that only the Diabolik is yours. Everything else belongs to your girlfriend. Trust me.”

  I nodded. He handed over his bar association membership card, and I gave them my identity document; on the line for occupation, it said “office worker.” A little trick that a veteran reporter on the courts beat had taught me when I first started working on the city news desk: “Make sure to get a new piece of ID that doesn’t identify you as a journalist. It’s always a good idea not to tell the truth. Go down to city hall and make sure they put down that you’re an office worker, just to keep from scaring anyone.” He was a good journalist, a member of a venerable old profession. The proof of the technique’s effectiveness was in the eyes of the prison guard as he studied my ID. He nodded to his colleague, and the door loudly clicked open.

  “Let in the lawyer and his assistant.”

  I’d never been to the Ucciardone prison before. I hoped never to enter through the other door, the one for prisoners and suspects. The courtyard was a shadowy gray, faced in smooth stone. The star-shaped plan had been designed by the architect Nicolò Puglia, at the behest of King Ferdinand I, at the turn of the nineteenth century. Each wing of the prison was a circle out of Dante’s Inferno, under the control of the Mafia.

  Vito Carriglio was in one of the wings reserved for ordinary criminals. He hadn’t even been considered worthy of picciotto status. Crimes against children, back then, were viewed with disdain even by Cosa Nostra.

  The guards led us to Wing 3, North Side. We climbed stairs. Through the barred windows that provided some light to the hallway we could glimpse Monte Pellegrino. I saw Castello Utveggio, its red stone touched by the fingers of the morning sun. The view was not one suggestive of incarceration, at least if you looked out the window. The lawyer directed me to a solid hardwood door at the end of the corridor: the entrance to the visiting room of Wing 3. The guards let us in and then went away, locking the door behind them. In the room there was a table bolted to the floor; around it stood four Formica chairs. We sat down.

  The silence of the room was immediately shattered by the creak of the opening door. Two prison guards came in, followed by a corpulent man in a blue tracksuit, with shackles and chains on his wrists. I recognized the feverish eyes, now devoid of any trace of defiance. He looked like a sick man.

  “Carriglio, we’re going to chain one hand to this table. Remember, behave, or in we come. Counselor …” concluded the first guard, touching the visor of his cap in a gesture of respect.

  “Grazie,” Gallina replied.

  The two officers left the room.

  Vito Carriglio met my gaze: he hadn’t recognized me, but he knew that he’d be talking to the man who had mentioned Sant’Onofrio, and now he also knew that that man was me.

  “Counselor, chistu cu è?” he asked all the same.

  “The journalist, the one who knows things.”

  “And what do you know, vossia?” he asked me, using the Sicilian term of address.

  “I know that your picciriddi are at Sant’Onofrio. But you need to help us: tell us where and how to find them.”

  Vito Carriglio gazed at me as if I were a landscape rather than a human being. His eyes wandered to some random point just above the top of my head. Then, with his free hand, he covered his eyes and sat silently.

  “I’m not crazy,” he began, in the tone of voice of someone trying to explain. “I hate the Savasta family, I hate my wife and all her people. They’ve treated me as if I were less than nothing. Maybe I am, you’re a journalist and you know what less than nothing amounts to, you’ve studied, you see people, you understand everything.”

  I thought of his wife’s words, when she’d told me that I couldn’t understand a thing. I nodded my head in agreement; I didn’t want to interrupt.

  “You must have understood that I had no choice in this. I had to punish my wife and all her people. They don’t feel pain. You can sting them and they just laugh. But there is one thing they care about: the family. The blood family. The children, the children’s children … and I hated them with a hatred that was stronger than the love that I have for my children.”

  The love that I have.

  “So they’re still alive?”

  “Let me go on. Vossia needs to keep quiet. I’ve decided to tell the truth and I have to explain it my way.”

  “Forgive me.”

  Counselor Gallina touched my leg.

  “Friday at noon I went to get them in my Fiat 128, the way I do every week. Giuseppe sat in the front seat, and Salvatore and Costanza sat in back. They asked me: Papà, what, are we going to stay with our aunt? No, I told them, no we’re not. This time we’re going to the country. There’s a surprise. And I drove toward the highway, Statale 113, Ficarazzi, Bagheria, Solanto, Altavilla Milicia. We got to Contrada Sant’Onofrio before the clock struck one. I was taking them to a farmhouse I had rented—you don’t say a word, I won’t say a word—a few months back. Three rooms, middle of the olive groves. Before going to the farmhouse we went through the town of Altavilla: I wanted to buy some mulberries. Costanza’s crazy about them and they’re about to go out of season. I stopped in the middle of the road; there was an old man with a wicker basket full to overflowing with mulberries: sweet, delicious, tardoni—end of the season. I paid him for a kilo, and then we went to the house. In the trunk of the Fiat 128, I had a bag of fava beans and a big roll of duct tape. I let the kids out and they started playing in the yard with the strummula, you know, a spinning top, what do you all call it? I told them to stay home and be good because I had to go to town and buy a few more things. Half an hour later I came back with two tanks of propane. We spent a very nice afternoon, the three of them napping as I shelled the fava beans, making dinner. It was a pretty evening; I waited f
or nightfall before sitting down to dinner: fava bean soup, bread, and mulberries for dessert. The three of them were famished, they kept saying: Papà, what time is dinner? And I said: now, now, dinner’s ready. In the kitchen I poured a bottle of sleeping pills into the soup, I think the brand name was Minias. The way they gobbled down that soup was a pleasure to see. Then the mulberries. Costanza gave me a kiss, Giuseppe and Salvatore were tired: they were both yawning. Or it might have been the sleeping pills … in ten minutes they were asleep on the sofa, like a pile of puppies, the two boys holding hands. I carried two mattresses into the living room. I took the duct tape and started sealing all the windows. I laid the three of them out on the mattresses. By the time I was done working it was ten o’clock. Then I carried the two propane tanks into the living room, opened both of them, and went out into the yard. The sky was covered with stars. I looked up: it was beautiful.”

  My heart was about to stop.

  “I’ll even tell you where my children are: the tenth olive tree on the right, looking out from the house. I made sure they were clean and tidy before I put them in the grave, I dressed them nicely, and I wiped off the foam they had on their mouths.”

  I was unable to speak. I touched Counselor Gallina’s arm. His eyes had filled with tears. He lifted his hand and touched me back, lightly, a brotherly pat: solidarity between survivors of a shipwreck. We were eyewitnesses to horror; the meaning of life was drowning before our eyes. We sat for two minutes in silence in that room where the table was bolted to the floor. There was nothing left to say. Actually, we were bolted to the spot: to reality, to hatred.

  Vito Carriglio’s expression hadn’t changed a bit; he looked at his defense lawyer and asked him for a cigarette.

  An hour later, a dozen squad cars were on their way to Contrada Sant’Onofrio, in search of the tenth olive tree, the olive tree of horror. The engineering corps showed up with shovels and floodlights.

  A crowd of townspeople gathered: word had spread rapidly. I was with Filippo Lombardo, who was photographing everything in sight: the little house, the olive grove, the squad cars with their flashing lights, the beginning of the excavations.

  I was sitting off to the side, on a bench in front of the house where, probably, that Friday afternoon, the children had tied strings to their strummule and spun them. I was looking out at some random point in the countryside, as if in search of consolation. In the distance, I heard the screams of Rosaria Savasta. Darkness fell. An old man with a gray cap and a brown fustian suit sat down next to me. He asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one. Then he said: “Do you work for the city newsroom?”

  City newsroom? That voice, that tone, like a dried walnut. “Yes, I work the city beat. Then you …”

  “In that case you must be the journalist I called. I had a suspicion: you were the first one to show up this afternoon.”

  “But what did you know?”

  “Nothing. That a car had come into town and that there was a man, a cristiano, driving, and three little ones, tre picciriddi. They asked me for a kilo of mulberries and I sold it to them. Then, the next day, I saw the same car drive off, with only the cristiano at the wheel. I asked around. Who he was, who he wasn’t. I found out the name. To me, this story of children who were in the car and then children who weren’t there anymore, it didn’t sit well. It made me think. And I had to tell someone about it.”

  “Grazie.”

  “Di niente,” the man said. “Don’t mention it.”

  He stood up and walked past the floodlights: his dark suit swallowed the light.

  Nothing and no one glittered that night.

  ROSALIA

  A Daughter

  MILAN, JANUARY 2011

  The dark eyes of a girl who wanted certainties staring into mine, brimming over with angry tears. I have a clear memory of that meeting. The wound left by Palermo was deep in her. She was asking me to help her find her way back to a future that her circumstances were denying her. I was just a journalist doing his best to separate himself from his work. Over here, the young man; over there, the beat reporter. It was the only way to keep from being overwhelmed by the death-dealing stench of blood. In those years, Cosa Nostra had lost its mind. It was reacting in a ferocious, disproportionate manner, chasing after a dream of power straight out of Shakespeare: in order to force the world to kneel at its feet, it was willing to forget there had ever been rules. So the Mafia broke solemn promises bosses had made to one another, cruelly persecuted the weak, dissolved children in baths of acid, slaughtered women, mutilated corpses.

  Deep in every Sicilian’s heart, there is an icy madness.

  PALERMO, FEBRUARY 1984

  “Dottore, you need to come see this. Over.”

  “Vela 2, what is it?”

  “A 10-79. It’s absurd. Over.”

  “Give me the location.”

  “Piazza Giulio Cesare. Over.”

  “Sorry, but Vela 2, where’s that?”

  “Dottore, come on, the train station. Over.”

  The guy who covered the political beat, Pippo Suraci, looked up from his Olympia typewriter, stopped pounding the keys, and, speaking to no one in particular, said: “I wonder what happened at the station?” Then he went back to writing.

  The news editor lit an MS cigarette and waved me over with his lighter. I stepped closer. I’d heard the police radio, too. A 10-79 was code for a request for a medical examiner: a murder had been committed. And an “absurd” one, too, according to what the officer on the scene had just said.

  My boss waved his lighter, pointing to the door of the newsroom. His lips were inhaling smoke. He didn’t even have time to say: “Go.”

  “Okay, I’m going. I’ve got a pocketful of phone tokens, and if I find a working phone I’ll let you know.”

  “The train station is the only place in Palermo where you can find working phone booths. As soon as you get there, give me a call, because we’re about to put the paper to bed. And take a photographer with you,” my boss said, chewing on the smoke.

  I called up to the photographers’ room. Filippo Lombardo answered and a few seconds later he was downstairs at the front desk of the building. I told him to hop on the back of my Vespa, and in eight minutes flat we were at Piazza Giulio Cesare: I’d never known that was the name of the piazza in front of the train station.

  “Be a beat reporter, you’ll learn all about the world,” my first editor in chief had told me. And now I was learning.

  Three squad cars with their flashing blue lights, a dozen policemen, an ambulance: all of them clustering around a gray Ford Escort abandoned in the middle of the piazza, theoretically double parked. I spotted the “dottore,” Antonio Gualtieri. Even the chief of the mobile squad had come out to see.

  We exchanged a quick greeting. Filippo mounted his flashgun. It was noon on a winter day: the gray sky cast a flat, ugly light on the scene. The piazza was the usual picture of chaos: a group of taxis; three horse-drawn carriages, their drivers wielding whips; cars parked like so many pickup sticks. A wave of humanity that washed into and out of one of the farthest-flung train stations on the entire Italian peninsula. I knew that piazza: every trip I took back then was by train and followed the rule of “plus fourteen.” Paris? Eighteen hours from Rome, plus fourteen more to reach Rome from Palermo. Amsterdam? Twenty hours, plus fourteen. I saw lots of Europe, I met plenty of people: it wasn’t a geographic handicap, it was just the distance necessary to understand the journey.

  “What’s happened, Antonio?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  Filippo was behind me, and he test-fired his flashgun. Gualtieri opened the passenger door of the Ford Escort. There was something the size of a soccer ball on the front seat, concealed under a newspaper.

  Gualtieri lifted the paper and two eyes, a nose, and a mouth appeared, the color of antiqued leather. The effect was straight out of Madame Tussaud’s, but both Gualtieri and I knew very well that wax had never been popular in Palermo. The city
had always preferred lead.

  The man’s head was sitting on the practically brand-new fabric upholstery of the Ford Escort’s passenger seat. There wasn’t a drop of blood anywhere around it. The eyes were closed, the mouth pursed in a whisper, the hair tousled but nicely arranged around a face that looked to be about forty. That head would gladly have spoken. Perhaps words of love, or else a curse.

  I noticed how Filippo’s flashgun lit up the car’s interior. Then Gualtieri led me around to the rear of the Escort.

  “Cucuzza, open the trunk.”

  The officer obeyed. In the trunk was a well-dressed corpse: a dark-brown three-piece suit, black shoes, a shirt that must have once been white. The tie lay beside the body, since the neck around which it had once been knotted was no longer there. The corpse had been arranged to fit in that tiny space: the Ford Escort had won the title of “Car of the Year” for 1981, but it was still a compact sedan. There was not a trace of blood in the trunk, either.

  “Antonio, what ideas have you come up with?” I asked Gualtieri.

  “Must have been Robespierre,” he said with a laugh, and I joined in to jolly him along.

  “I don’t remember any beheadings in Palermo,” I said. I’d been working the crime beat for almost five years, so I considered myself a veteran.

  The chief of the mobile squad looked at me the way you look at an abstract painting: with interest, but with some misgivings about the artist’s ability.

  “We don’t even know what his name is. Before we talk about precedents, we ought to identify him.”

  “I’ll come by your office later on.”

  “All right.”

  The only reason he agreed was that he knew my father was a Juventus fan—a Juventino—in addition to rooting for Palermo. When I told him that, the first time he agreed to see me, I made him happy. He immediately trotted out the collection of pennants that Giampiero Boniperti had given him when he was a young officer working the Turin stadium. Half the population of Palermo, by tradition, rooted for Juve as their second team. This was the legacy of a mysterious culture that long ago drove Sicilian pastry chefs, descendants of the geniuses who invented the cassata in the tenth century, to create a chocolate cake that’s better than the Austrian Sacher torte and call it the “torta Savoia.” A Savoy torte in Palermo. A form of contrappasso, like Dante’s poetic justice, but gastronomic in nature: much as if the Milanese, instead of inventing their renowned cutlet, had invented michette con il kebab.