The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  Rosalia was making comparisons, while I tagged along behind her.

  The oval medallion dangling from the stolen necklace had a border of interwoven laurel branches. At its center was a leg that could have belonged to a Hollywood diva. The engraver who’d done it clearly had an artistic touch: a fifties realist, from the school of Renato Guttuso. A shapely thigh, a slender calf, a graceful foot. All that was missing was the signature of the Maestro of Bagheria: Guttuso.

  Rosalia pointed to an ex-voto down low, almost touching the floor.

  “Look at this one, there’s a close resemblance.”

  I knelt down beside her. Our shoulders touched. I held her hand, which held the pendant, and I laid it over the ex-voto hanging from the rock. One was an enlargement of the other.

  We’d found it. I read out loud: “The Pecoraino family placed this ex-voto in gratitude for the grace received by Filomena—May 8, 1981.” I scribbled on my notepad: “Pecoraino,” “Filomena,” and the date. Three illegible scrawls. Rosalia looked down at the sheet of paper and asked: “What on earth did you just write?”

  “Nothing, just notes for myself.”

  She grabbed my arm with a dazzling gleam in her dark eyes. Being close to the other Rosalia, her namesake, had given her a concentration of distilled energy that, as we zoomed along the hairpin curves leading back to the Via della Favorita, was unleashed upon my chest, both hands holding tight as if they were a gentle vise. Every time the Vespa braked, I could feel her bosom press against my back. I silently thanked the Santuzza.

  At noon I was sitting across from Antonio Gualtieri, after dropping Rosalia off at the bus stop for Piazza Principe di Camporeale.

  On his desk was a copy of Tuttosport, with a headline about Michel Platini on the front page.

  “Antonio, he can do it, he can do it.”

  “Keep it up and I’ll have you arrested.”

  Platini was Juventus’s star player, and he was in line for the player of the year award.

  “I know that you’re not allowed to joke about the Pallone d’Oro, but I’m saying it in all sincerity.”

  “It might be safer for you if we stick to murders: What do you want to know?”

  “Who are the Pecorainos?”

  “Pecoraino who?”

  “I can’t tell you that. A daughter or a wife ought to be named Filomena. This may have something to do with the severed head. I saw a necklace with a pendant. Do you think you could do me a favor—”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish.

  “Zoller!” he shouted, as if the office were going up in flames.

  The inspector came rushing in.

  “At your orders!”

  “This young friend of mind wants to be an investigator. You wouldn’t happen to have a spot for him on your squad, would you?”

  “Dottore, if you say so …” Zoller replied with a tone of resignation.

  “You see, not even Zoller wants you. Do you really have to keep digging into the story of that head?”

  I said nothing about Rosalia and the promise I’d made her.

  “I’m obsessed with it. My boss says that it’s such a weird murder it boosts circulation.”

  The pity ploy seemed to work.

  “All right. Zoller, let’s see if we can help this young man who wants to be famous. Check into this Federica …”

  “Filomena Pecoraino.”

  “Filomena. But what does this woman have to do with the murder?”

  “I really have no idea. Maybe nothing. But if I want to figure it out, it’s important to find out who she is.”

  Gualtieri looked me up and down. “Here’s the young gumshoe again,” he said.

  Zoller left the office with a brisk “I’m on it, sir!” in the direction of his commanding officer.

  The policeman standing watch outside came in with two espressos. We talked about the Palermo team and how it was making me suffer, and about Juventus and how it was kindling dreams of championships. In those ten minutes, the phone must have rung a dozen times. I heard him say: “No, you go to hell, asshole!” then, “No, it’s not his shift,” then, “All right, he’s authorized to use his Ciao moped to follow the guy,” then, “The Greco clan? Well, what do you want me to do about it?” and finally, “No, I don’t think I’ll be home tonight earlier than ten. Calamari will be fine.” Fragments of conversations with subordinate officers, judges, the chief of police, noncommissioned officers, and his wife. Gualtieri’s telephone was a nightmare with a ring tone.

  Zoller came back.

  “Dottore, I think I’ve found it. Pecoraino, Filomena, born in Palermo on August 10, 1970, died in Palermo on February 16, 1982. The daughter of Pecoraino, Ruggero, born in 1947, the brother-in-law of Incorvaia, Salvatore, born in 1944, fugitive from the law, the capo of the mandamento of Partanna Mondello according to the testimony of the informant Gaspare Fascetta.”

  Giovanni Neglia had stolen the wrong thing from the wrong apartment. I told Gualtieri about the stolen pendant with the copy of the ex-voto; I told him what I’d seen in the grotto atop Monte Pellegrino, without mentioning the fact that I’d been there with Rosalia.

  He thanked me. By that time, he’d come up with an idea of what had happened.

  I went back to the newspaper in a hurry, just in time to write a front-page piece. The headline read: “Mystery of the Severed Head: There’s a Lead.”

  I made no mention in the article of either family, Pecoraino or Incorvaia. I simply mentioned a copy of an ex-voto that had provided the investigation with a lead. I quoted Rosalia Neglia, the bereaved daughter, as saying that she needed to find out the truth. “You can’t live with the burden of doubt,” she said, in conclusion. As if she were a Kantian philosopher. Words she’d never said, but that I had thought. As in so many cases of shoddy journalism, I’d attributed my own thoughts to the person I was interviewing, in place of her own. Nice work, I said to myself as I reread what I’d written.

  I spent the afternoon at the paper, looking over my notes from the piazza in front of the train station, Porticello, the mobile squad, and Monte Pellegrino. I couldn’t figure out the reason for the ex-voto: the little girl had died in the end. No grace had been received. As is so often the case, neither the doctors nor the Santuzza had done a bit of good. Then why had the Pecoraino family paid to engrave not one but two gold ex-votos?

  I asked Annamaria, my friend the archivist, to find me the death notices for February 17, 1982. The day after little Filomena died. An hour later, there was a Xerox on my desk.

  Papà Ruggero and Mamma Maria, in an agony of grief, mourn the loss of

  FILOMENA PECORAINO

  age 12, taken from this life, an innocent child, after terrible suffering.

  May God embrace her in glory.

  Our gratitude goes out to the physicians of the Children’s Hospital, especially Dr. Rosa Buttitta.

  There was a lead. Just like it said on our front page.

  The Children’s Hospital looked like a Chilean penitentiary. Gray, cube-shaped, all it lacked were machine-gun nests at the corners and barbed wire all around it.

  You could feel the despair of the place on your skin, as if it were a uniform. A mother hit me with the wheelchair she was pushing: the little girl sitting in it looked at me glassy-eyed, her face deformed by a spasm. At the front desk, I asked for Dr. Rosa Buttitta.

  “Do you have an appointment with the head physician?” a fat man with white hair and a copy of La Settimana Enigmistica draped over the telephone asked me.

  “No, I wanted to see Dr. Buttitta.”

  “Which means you want to see the head physician.”

  “Oh, I see. Sorry.”

  I’d gotten off on the wrong foot. I introduced myself and the receptionist shoved La Settimana Enigmistica aside, making a call to the ward upstairs and reporting that a journalist was asking to come up.

  “It’s a sad case, about a little girl who died,” I suggested.

  The receptionist covered the rec
eiver with one hand and froze me to the spot by whispering: “Believe me, all our cases are sad.”

  On the other end of the line, someone said something.

  “All right, I’ll send him up.”

  He hung up the phone. He would have been much happier calling security and having me tossed out on the street.

  The ward was on the third floor. The sign at the entrance, plastic, said: GENERAL MEDICINE 1—CHIEF PHYSICIAN DR. ROSA BUTTITTA. With an X-Acto knife, someone had carved into the plastic: “Ring Bell.”

  I obeyed instructions and rang, even if there was no need: the door was open.

  There was a hustle and bustle of nurses. At the end of the corridor I noticed a tall woman in a lab coat, with fluffy blonde hair, flanked by two young men, likewise dressed in white. I stopped a male nurse pushing a gurney.

  “Is that the head physician?” I asked, pointing at the woman.

  He nodded his head and moved away.

  I walked toward her. She had just dismissed her two assistants and was walking back into her office.

  I introduced myself.

  “Ah, the journalist. Come with me.”

  We walked into her office. A simple room with a white metal desk, a sofa in burgundy Naugahyde, and a glass-front cabinet for the medicines that pharmaceutical reps gave her. The wall behind the desk was adorned with a large baroque oil painting, a landscape with red highlights. A second canvas was hanging next to a Swedish bookcase: it depicted a man from behind, looking out over the sea from the rocks. An image that could contain, depending on the eyes of the beholder, either hope or despair.

  “Do you like art?”

  “It helps me to survive,” she replied, with a faint but courteous smile.

  “I could never do the work you do.”

  “I chose it at age twenty. Now I’m fifty-six. With these hands, I’ve touched pain and suffering of every kind.”

  She held her hands out to me: her fingernails were painted with Mavala, a product to stop nail biting.

  “Doctor, forgive me. I need to ask what you remember about a little girl who, sadly, is no longer with us.”

  I blushed at the hypocrisy of the euphemism. This wasn’t a woman who needed false sanctimony.

  “Tell me the name and the date of death.”

  “Filomena Pecoraino, February 16, 1982.”

  She called an assistant and told him to bring her the clinical file.

  “She was my patient. I remember. She had a bone tumor that began in her right leg. She passed away in the orthopedic ward. But I followed her case throughout her illness. They diagnosed the tumor when she was ten. A year of chemo, and she seemed much improved. Her parents thought she was cured.”

  And they offered their thanks to St. Rosalia, I added in my mind.

  It was all becoming clearer.

  “Do you remember ever seeing Filomena wearing a gold necklace?”

  “She never wanted to take it off. Every time I came to see her, I’d joke about her jewelry. Her parents had given it to her. They’d told her it ensured that Saint Rosalia, the Santuzza, would protect her. I’ve never encouraged that sort of thing among my patients. Still, of course, fairy tales for children …”

  She broke off. Her eyes focused on a point midway between the glass-front pharmaceuticals cabinet and the bookshelf. The dirty white of the wall.

  “Did they call you when she died?”

  “Yes, they wanted me to be with them. The little girl was half-unconscious, because of all the drugs she was on; she died in the evening, holding her mamma’s hand. I remember that at first the signora couldn’t seem to cry. She silently took the necklace off Filomena’s neck. She put it in her purse, walked away from the bed like a robot. Then she fainted.”

  Every one of us keeps relics, and our memories in particular brim over with them: fragments of conversations, images, states of mind, little objects. We venerate them as if they were a saint’s thighbone. Our own personal saints: secular, misbelieving, carnal saints. I once knew a girl who carried a rock with her everywhere she went. She kept it in her stylish leather Tolfa handbag. It was a small, smooth stone, from a distant beach. A hippie who was in love with her had picked it up on a Pacific beach. She was never without her South Sea stone: “It tells me where to go, it keeps me in equilibrium.” Those were years of starry sentiments, words plucked out of the skies above, crystal-clear eyes.

  Filomena’s necklace only remained in Maria Pecoraino’s purse for the time it took to get home from the Children’s Hospital. She wrapped it in an embroidered handkerchief, and once she was back in her bedroom, she decided where to keep it: she opened the Empire-style drop-front dresser that stood at the foot of her bed, pulled out a small red velvet box from inside the drop front, and slipped the necklace into it. She snapped the box shut: that sound was a foreshadowing of the closing of the small white casket. Then she hid the key in the top drawer, under her handkerchiefs.

  It was February 16, 1982. Almost two years later, the Empire-style dresser would be rifled through by the nimble gloved fingers of a thief who only stole honest things.

  I returned home with a picture in my mind: a view over the shoulder of the man looking out to sea. Hope or despair? I wavered between the two, thinking back over the whole story as it slowly reassembled itself. What hope had Giovanni Neglia had of surviving his own fatal misstep? And what kind of despair lay in wait for Rosalia? The despair of truth? Should I have told her the whole truth? Left out the details? Explained to her that a little girl had died young and a mother would never again be a whole person? Would she have understood? Would it have been enough for Rosalia to understand the horrible cruelty suffered by her father and her family?

  I sensed the intolerable disproportion between the offense and the punishment, a punishment inflicted in the name of a code of justice that was as pitiless as it was primitive. I needed to think it over, choose carefully the words to use with her, and in my paper.

  I needed Lilli; I needed her gentle sweetness: I needed to get my thoughts back into proportion.

  “Mio amore, where have you been?”

  She welcomed me at the door with a warm hug. I felt that warmth loosen the hardest knots inside me: I would have liked to curl up and go to sleep inside her.

  “The story of the severed head.”

  “You always see such horrible things.”

  “I’m a beat reporter: I have no choice.”

  “Do you want something to drink? Fabrizio bought some beer.”

  I heard “Father and Son” wafting in from the living room. Lilli loved Cat Stevens; Serena hated him.

  “Grazie, my sweet love.”

  She got out a quart bottle of Messina beer and a couple of glasses. We sat down on the brown sofa.

  It’s not time to make a change,

  Just relax, take it easy.

  You’re still young, that’s your fault,

  There’s so much you have to know.

  I felt like crying. Lilli took my hand: she caressed it as if it were velvet, with the grain. I felt the warmth of her embrace spread through me again. That girl was my sunshine.

  We drank our beer. Luckily, the next track came on: it was “Tea for the Tillerman.” And Fabrizio and Serena came home.

  “Journalist, you really are one lucky man.”

  I looked at her with a faint smile. Lilli said: “Ciao, Sere.”

  “Hey all!” said Fabrizio, displaying an enormous cardboard tray wrapped in pale-pink bakery paper.

  “Sfincione,” he said. A deep-dish Sicilian pizza, a specialty of Palermo. “We’re celebrating tonight,” he added.

  “Celebrating what, Fabri?”

  “Top scores on my business management test. A-plus-plus. You understand? Plus-plus!”

  It had been a big hump to get over, as he’d explained to me at length. I was happy for him, and for us, because now we had a couple of kilos of warm aromatic sfincione.

  The evening had found a new point of equilibrium. I took o
ff Cat Stevens, and I put on “Young Americans.” A little funky Bowie was an open window with a view of the future I was dreaming of, far away from the ferocity of Palermo.

  The Mafia has always believed that control of a specific territory is one of the foundations of real power. You’re powerful only if you’re in control, and only if everyone knows you’re in control. In the spring of 1982, when Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was appointed the prefect of Palermo, a debate arose immediately over the powers that had been conferred on the legendary terrorist hunter, along with his new position. The debate didn’t last long: the Italian state hadn’t given Dalla Chiesa any real power. Everyone agreed on that point, even Dalla Chiesa himself, and he demanded an explanation from the man who had sent him down to Sicily, Interior Minister Virginio Rognoni. In return he received promises that were never kept, and no real power. Five months later, the Mafia assassinated the general, his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, and their driver, Domenico Russo. A resident of the quarter hung a pen-and-paper sign on the place where they were murdered: “Here died the hope of all honest Palermitans.” It was temporarily true. But the murder of Dalla Chiesa also contained another truth, so well understood by the Mafia: you can’t win if you don’t have control. Dalla Chiesa was intelligent but helpless. Unlike the mob bosses who ordered his death.

  The capi of Cosa Nostra not only had the power of control, but also had the duty to show they possessed it. Their murders had to make a point. Everyone had to understand. The Corleonese took the great leap forward: they brought the strategy of massacres to Palermo with a succession of car bombs and dynamite buried under the asphalt, and assaults on the highway; they introduced a degree of ferocity that had never been seen before. Cutting off a head was an obligatory phase in that escalation, in that delirium of murderous power. If life were a lecture, then the decapitation of Giovanni Neglia would represent the phrase “for example.”

  Castrenze Neglia finished covering the last vat of tuna roe with salt. His assistant helped him to put back the balatone, the large, smooth stone that weighed down the salt and roe in the press. He wiped the sweat off his face and scratched his head.