The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  When we board the plane, I lose sight of him. The Sicilian woman with the garter belt sashays down the rows to her seat. The old Sicilian couple cart plastic bags and tied-up parcels down the aisle, as if they planned to stow all their household goods in the luggage rack. Apart from a few overweight American tourists struggling past the narrow rows of seats, the plane is full of Italians, most of them business travelers. I always take the evening plane from Venice to Palermo. I like to get there at night, just early enough to have dinner. When I’m in my seat, I send another two texts: one to Salvo, my trusted taxi driver; one to Shobha, the photographer I’ve been working with for so long that our relationship’s almost like a marriage. I tell them we’re twenty minutes late and ask Shobha to reserve a table in a restaurant for us.

  As always, I plan to do a bit more work on the flight and start flicking through my archive material. Then I take from my pocket the book about the mystery of the lawyer Paolo Borsellino’s red diary. When I open it, I immediately have the feeling that someone’s reading over my shoulder. Sicilian paranoia is starting even before I’ve arrived in Sicily. Every time I fly to Palermo I wonder if it’s a good idea to read articles about Mafia bosses or investment strategies or flick through lectures about the Mafia and power. Or even read Antimafia Duemila, a newspaper that is always sent to subscribers in a strikingly neutral envelope, as if it were a porn mag. Sometimes I feel a bit rebellious and think: I don’t care. We’re living in Europe, after all, not in Transnistria! Italy’s one of the founding members of the EU! And sometimes I snap my book shut and put it away. As I do now.

  When the man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit sits down in the same row as me, I’m already flicking unexcitedly through the in-flight magazine, which says that an apartment in Venice will lay you golden eggs, because you can rent it out all year as a holiday apartment. He gives me a friendly but noncommittal nod, the way you greet a stranger with whom you have nothing in common but your flight route. The seat between us is empty, and the man sets his briefcase down on it.

  Before I had to kill someone, I would cross myself. I would say: “Dear God, stand by me! Make sure nothing happens!” But I wasn’t the only one who crossed himself beforehand and prayed to God. We all did.

  I still remember every one of his sentences. To be able to speak to him, I had to apply to the Ministry of the Interior. I had to set out my motives and guarantee that I wouldn’t ask him any questions about current trials. Our meeting had to have the agreement not only of the secretary of state at the Ministry of the Interior, but also of every individual public prosecutor in the Mafia trials in which Marcello Fava appeared, either as defendant or witness. Every week, at first, to check the state of things, I called the Servizio Centrale, the department of the Ministry of the Interior in Rome responsible for turncoat mafiosi, whose name sounds like some sort of secret-service operation. It was very quickly made clear to me, however, that my inquiries wouldn’t speed up matters. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” For six months I heard nothing at all. And I’d actually given up all hope when I got a call from Rome one afternoon. “Servizio Centrale,” said a voice. My application had been approved. I was to make my way to a bar in Rome, which, as fate would have it, bore the name Lo zio d’America, The American Uncle.

  A few days later a taxi set me down a short distance from the bar. It looked like one of those labyrinthine Italian motorway service stations which you step into to get an espresso and leave with five CDs, some Sardinian donkey sausage, and a lump of parmesan. Behind an endless counter stood barmen with paper hats sitting on their gelled hair. When I was about to order an espresso, my phone rang. I felt in my pocket, from the depths of which it went on ringing, until a man standing next to me said: “I called you. Please follow me.”

  I hadn’t caught his name. I walked some distance behind him. For a split second I wondered what would happen if the man I was following wasn’t the man I thought he was. I followed him along potholed pavements, past 1960s buildings and box hedges that smelled of cats. The periphery of Rome is so faceless that I had trouble remembering the way. At last he stopped outside the entrance to a building, where two men stood looking conspicuously inconspicuous, as only policemen can. The hallway smacked of a housing project, with greyish-yellow paint flaking off the walls.

  Afterwards we would often go out to eat together. Maybe that’s sadism. Could be, I don’t know. And I don’t know what else to call it, either. But that’s what happened. We met up in the evening and went out to eat together. You just have to forget the whole business. Nothing happened, nothing at all.

  The mafioso Marcello Fava was waiting for me on the third floor. In an apartment that had been rented by the Ministry of the Interior under a false name—for “collaborators with the judiciary,” as turncoat mafiosi are known in the politically correct and somewhat euphemistic language of the law. Since Marcello Fava was working with the public prosecutor’s office, he, his wife, and his two sons had to be protected from the revenge of Cosa Nostra. They had had to leave Sicily and live somewhere in Italy under police protection and false names.

  Although the apartment was uninhabited, it was still full of traces of other lives. On a wall was a picture of a mountain scene and an almost blind Venetian mirror; in one corner stood a torn, mustard-colored sofa, and next to it a battered wicker chair, an old gas stove. The stove had seen better days, and on the dining-room table there was a waxed tablecloth scored with knife marks. It was as if the inhabitants had only gone out for a moment; they would shortly open the door and stare in horror at the strangers in their apartment—a woman and six men.

  The shutters were lowered, and the policemen took up their positions. A bodyguard walked up and down on the balcony, watching the street; two officials stood down by the main entrance, another had planted himself in the hallway, another was reading the latest John Grisham. They were all chewing gum and wore ripped jeans, safari waistcoats, and earrings. Fava, on the other hand, looked like an employee of the Banco di Sicilia. He wore a midnight-blue suit with a light-blue tie. His face was rosy and scattered with a few freckles, his dark blond hair carefully parted. His eyebrows had a reddish tinge. He nervously ran his palms over his sleeves, over his trouser legs, as if he lived in fear of something awful happening to his suit. Fava had brought a little briefcase, which rested on his knees, and which he initially clung onto. Like a student going to his first lecture.

  “Tranquillo,” he said, as he switched on my tape recorder. I was completely relaxed. Uttered in a Sicilian accent by a mafioso, the word sounds like an executioner trying to reassure his victim. “Tranquillo.” We were sitting by artificial light at the kitchen table, and Fava was telling the story of his life. A life that had only really begun when he was “chosen.”

  It was a wonderful thing for me. It was everyone’s desire to be accepted into Cosa Nostra. To be close to these people, to be respected by everyone. Wherever you go, no one dares stand in your way. Respect is your due. Even though other people couldn’t know, they sensed you were a man of honour. That you were entitled to everything. That’s what they’re like, the mafiosi of Palermo. And only in Palermo. Not in the whole of Sicily.

  He talked about his acceptance into the Mafia as if talking about an awakening. Fava had been twenty years old when he was accepted into the Porta Nuova family in Palermo. Unlike the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, in which the members of a family are actually related by blood, a family of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is based on elective affinity. The family is the smallest organizational unit of Cosa Nostra, whose bonds are reinforced by the acceptance ritual. Even today, the Mafia uses an initiation ceremony that seems to have had its origins in the rites of the Freemasons and makes a deep, almost religious, impression on young and ambitious mafiosi: the presence of the godparents, the drop of blood falling on the holy picture, the invocation of the price to be paid for betrayal, the burning of the picture of the saint—nothing significant has changed for centuries. It was only whe
n mafiosi started turning state’s evidence in droves that the boss, Bernardo Provenzano, suspended the initiation ritual. The mafiosi must not know the names of the members of their family, so that if one day they do become turncoats, they cannot betray them.

  Because if one person betrays, the others fall, too. No other Mafia organization in Italy is as hierarchically structured as Cosa Nostra. After the family comes the mandamento, the Mafia district, consisting of several Mafia families. Above this is the provincial commission, which is composed of the district regional heads. And at the very top, for a while, was the cupola, the commissione interprovinciale, the Mafia council consisting of the heads of the provincial commissions—a council that existed until the boss Totò Riina assumed autocratic power.

  The family into which Marcello Fava was accepted wasn’t just any Mafia family; it was a clan that had produced some remarkable bosses, some of whom later shook planet Mafia to the core. Tommaso Buscetta was part of the family—the first turncoat boss in the history of the Mafia, of whom the legendary anti-Mafia public prosecuter Giovanni Falcone once said, he was like a teacher who introduced him to the language of the Mafia. Salvatore Cancemi was a member, the boss who first spoke about the Mafia connections of Silvio Berlusconi and his right-hand man Marcello Dell’Utri—the former manager who became cofounder of the right-wing party Forza Italia, the inhouse party of the businessman Berlusconi. By founding the party, he was trying to react to the crisis that had arisen out of corruption investigations that went under the slogan “Clean Hands.” In 1993 Cosa Nostra had been in direct contact with representatives of Silvio Berlusconi, said the turncoat mafioso Antonino Giuffrè, concerning an alliance between the Mafia and the newly founded Forza Italia party. In 2004 Marcello Dell’Utri was sentenced in the first instance to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting a Mafia association. (In Italy, a sentence only comes into effect once it has reached the third “instance.”) By that time, his connection with the mafioso Vittorio Mangano was already well documented. On the initiative of Dell’Utri, Mangano had lived for two years in Berlusconi’s villa as a middleman for Cosa Nostra—officially as a “stable-keeper.”

  Vittorio Mangano also belonged to the Porta Nuova family, as did the boss Pippo Calò, known as the “Mafia’s cashier,” who was involved in the murder of “God’s banker,” Roberto Calvi, who was in charge of the Banca Ambrosiana and had transacted deals not only with the Vatican Bank but also with the Mafia. Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London with US$15,000 and heavy stones in his pockets. But Calò didn’t become a turncoat; he merely broke with the Mafia, without spilling any beans.

  Marcello Fava described his Mafia baptism as rapturously as if he were recalling his meeting with his first great love. He spoke with high esteem of his godfather, who wasn’t just one of the little group leaders who had acted as godfathers to other mafiosi, but a major boss. Fava obsessively described every detail of the ritual of his acceptance into the organization. How his baptism had taken place one morning in a warehouse, in the presence of twelve bosses. Who had all risen to their feet when the godfather came in. And who later withdrew for their deliberations. He had had to wait outside, along with three other boys who were also due for induction.

  When I asked him whether his memory wasn’t distorting things, Fava became furious. It was something you had to feel, he said defiantly. And he sounded like an unhappy lover, an abandoned lover, a man seduced. He praised the induction ritual as a holy liturgy—the burning of the holy picture, Santa Rosalia, San Giuseppe, the drop of blood dripping on the picture, the prophecy that he would be burned like the saint in his hand if he were ever to betray Cosa Nostra. And now he saw himself burning. A little bit more each day.

  Fava would never be able to lead a normal life. A mafioso who breaks his silence becomes an untouchable. Despised equally by the Mafia and by respectable Sicilians: by the Mafia because he has revealed their secrets in order to buy his freedom; by Sicilians because he has only repented in order to save his own skin. In the first few years after the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, mafiosi had gone over to the law in droves. Now it happens very rarely. Public prosecutors generally fail when they try to persuade imprisoned bosses to leave the organization. One prosecutor told me how, talking to one of them, he had painted his post-Mafia life in the most glowing terms, invoking the future of his children, who would grow up on the right side. The mafioso merely pointed with a smile at the prosecutor’s bodyguards and said, “Mr. Public Prosecutor, if you can’t rely on your own security, how are you going to protect me?” And the prosecutor hadn’t been able to give him an answer.

  The first time I was there, it was a trauma for me. Because they hadn’t told me anything about it beforehand, and then this boy I knew was brought in; it was terrible, he was crying and pleading, but there was nothing to be done. The decision had been made. No one could help him. He was punished as a warning to the others.

  I thought it was odd, hearing a mafioso talking about trauma. Plainly, it was easier for Fava to judge his actions in terms of psychological categories than moral ones. “Trauma” is an easier word to say than “murder.”

  Throughout the whole of the conversation he clutched a piece of paper on which he had written notes about his life, a life that had consisted of Mafia membership, bank raids, drug deals, murder. Mostly by strangling. It’s the Mafia’s preferred method of killing: no noise, no blood. Two men hold the victim tightly while a third strangles him—usually with a small wire loop, because strangling by hand is too troublesome. Totò Riina was famous among his men for always setting his own hand to the job. When he murdered the mafioso Rosario Riccobono at the end of a wine-fueled lunch, the boss called him by his nickname. “Saruzzo, your story is over,” he whispered tenderly, as he put his hands around the sleeping man’s neck. The two other mafiosi present held the helpless man down. With the strength of a bull, the boss strangled his victim in less than three minutes. That achievement was greatly admired in retrospect, even by the two turncoat mafiosi who later betrayed him.

  Fava was used to talking only to public prosecutors and defense lawyers. Perhaps that was why he sought comfort in that piece of paper, that crib sheet for the stages of his life: when he was boss of the Porta Nuova family, when he was on the run, the first time he was arrested, and when he turned pentito, defector. When he became an outcast. He wasn’t used to talking for once not about dates, facts, and names, but about what he had felt.

  A mafioso doesn’t find it hard to murder. At least, no harder than a soldier does. If Italy were to go to war with another country, and an Italian soldier were to shoot fifty or sixty of the enemy, the soldier wouldn’t be considered a criminal; he’d be honored as a war hero. The mafiosi say. Because they define themselves as soldiers, who never murder for personal reasons but only for their state and their people. What the world sees as a criminal organization the mafiosi see as a society, a state, a people. And for that reason a mafioso doesn’t have a bad conscience if he kills someone. He’s only interested in the judgment of his own people, not that of strangers. Just like a soldier who finds himself in a war and who has no feelings of guilt.

  The police gave no clue as to whether they were listening to Fava’s descriptions or wondering whether it was time to buy a new mobile phone. They hid in the semidarkness, behind blank, expressionless faces. They betrayed neither curiosity nor surprise, as if Fava were speaking not about murder and the Mafia but about how to download a software program.

  I wondered whether they secretly despised him. Until recently he had been on the other side. They had been “flunkeys” as far as he was concerned, not the guardian angels that he called them now. And for each of them, his arrest had meant a promotion and a silver badge nestling on dark blue velvet.

  I was a very clever boy, I’d committed a few robberies—those are things that don’t get past Cosa Nostra. So they approached me. I’d spent a few months in prison, and after that I was accep
ted.

  I tried to imagine the twenty-year-old Fava being made a “man of honor” in a warehouse in Palermo’s old town. Rising from a nessuno mischiato con niente, a nobody involved with nothing, to a person of respect. Someone who’s allowed to jump the queue in shops, is given free coffee and nodded to at the till: “It’s all paid for.” Someone who never needs to raise his voice. Someone below whose window the procession of the Madonna del Carmine, complete with brass band, stops so that he can hand the Madonna a few banknotes from his window. Sicilians are addicted to respect, and the Mafia sells them the dope.

  Fava spoke in those Sicilian sentences half of which evaporates, flies away, seeps away. What he couldn’t say in words, he said in gestures. He described little circles with his hand, curled his fingers and hooked them together; he pointed to imaginary dirt under his fingernails—he wasn’t even worth that!—and stuck out his index finger and little finger to ward off evil.

  His voice was amazingly light for a man, and as Sicilians often do, he used the remote past tense, a tense that sounds very formal and is now used very rarely, even in written Italian. Sicilian has neither a recent past tense nor a future tense; it knows only the present. And the very remote past.

  Fava came from the Kalsa. He had grown up in a family of ten—three sisters and six brothers—in a district of Palermo’s old town that the city’s middle class seldom goes near, and then only with very great caution, as if it were a wild animal that might attack you if you turn your back on it. He had grown up in a world of tufa-stone baroque and alley cats, tinkers and tinsmiths, a world in which the buzz of power saws seared the air and Eros Ramazzotti’s voice groaned from the ramshackle speakers of the CD salesmen.