Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  Fava was used to talking only to public prosecutors and defence 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 honoured 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 judgement 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 semi-darkness, 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 accepted.

  I tried to imagine the twenty-year-old Fava being made a ‘man of honour’ 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.

  When Fava thought of Palermo, his nostrils were filled with the scent of the fried-food stalls in the Piazza della Kalsa, the smell of seething oil bubbling away in big aluminium pots, the aroma of panelle, of chick-pea fritters, of roasted calves’ feet. He remembered picking the panelle out of their paper and saying hello to the fat man who always sat outside the church of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa in the rectangular shadow of a pollarded tree, cleaning olives and peeling potatoes to make croquettes. He remembered how there were always snails there on a Sunday, snails in garlic, from eleven in the morning till eight at night. And the fact that he would never again walk through the Kalsa with his two sons. Sometimes he consoled himself with the fact that at long last he no longer smelled of fear, fear of the police, of an undercover agent, of traitors in his own ranks, of a mission that he couldn’t refuse. Bringing a friend to his executioner.

  All his brothers worked in his family’s butcher’s shops in the Ballarò market, not far from the police headquarters. Fava had worked there as well; no one had asked any questions when he disappeared from time to time, for an hour, for half a day. His younger brother, Giuseppe, was in Cosa Nostra as well. He was arrested ten days after Marcello. And he has kept his mouth shut until now, as befits a man of honour.

  When Fava’s brothers found out that Marcello had become a turncoat, they closed up the iron shutters of their butcher’s shops and laid chrysanthemums outside them. Above them they hung a sign: Per un crasto, For a castrated billy-goat. Nothing dishonours a Sicilian more than this jibe. ‘We have no turncoat brother,’ they said, ‘we have only a dead brother.’

  I haven’t told my children anything about my past. You can imagine what our first meeting in jail was like, after my family had been taken out of Palermo and brought to a strange city where no one knows us. The two boys cried, they wanted to go back to Sicily, to their grandmother, to their cousins. My children have always been spoilt rotten. It was terrible for them, suddenly feeling they were all alone in the world. Then when I talked to them I made them understand that they would never have seen their father again if he hadn’t taken this step.

  When Fava talked about committing murder, he sounded like a car mechanic explaining the problems that arise when he takes out an old gearbox and puts a new one in. He smiled with a mixture of embarrassment and superiority, the way car mechanics smile when they’re talking about torque to weight ratios, knowing that the customer won’t have the faintest idea what they’re on about. But when he talked about his family he seemed to lose his composure, his voice trembling, as if what he regretted was not the murders but the shame he had brought on his family. There were eighty relatives in his family, counting only the closest blood relations. His children had no relatives now, they would never celebrate weddings with their family, or baptisms, or first communions. All because their father had wanted only the best for them. And had turned into a worm. Into less than nothing.

  I remember what it was like when I learned that my godfather had become a turncoat. It was a Sunday when I got the call. Men from my clan rang me up: ‘Get on your motorbike right now and come and see us!’ They sounded very agitated. I remember arriving at the meeting place outside Palermo half an hour later, where a lot of men of honour had already assembled and were waiting for me, stony-faced. They said, ‘Sit down.’ At that moment I knew nothing except that my godfather had been arrested two days previously. I thought, maybe they’ve killed him up at police headquarters. Because he’d tried to escape. Something like that. But then they told me: ‘Your godfather has become a turncoat.’ And I started laughing like a lunatic. ‘That’s why you had me almost kill myself driving through Palermo on my bike? To tell me some crap like that?’ ‘What do you mean crap,’ the others said, ‘it’s true.’ And then I really did have to sit down. It was the disappointment of my life. A myth collapsed for me. My godfather was – something like that. Someone who had been like a visiting card for me: if you thought about it, people were always mentioning the fact that he was my godfather. And now – a nobody. They all went underground for a while. As for me, I stayed quietly at home and waited. All around me men were being arrested, I was the only one who was spared the investigations. And I said to myself: my godfather’s forgotten about me.

  For the blink of an eye, I had the impression that Fava’s face had been set in motion, his eyelids
were flickering, his cheeks trembling and his freckles twitching. But then his cheeks turned pink and relaxed again, and Fava fell silent. The woven straw seat of the chair he was sitting on creaked. It was as if the straw were betraying his insecurity. For a long time there was no sound to be heard but the squeaking of the woven straw and the officer sitting by the door making a rustling sound as he turned the page of his John Grisham novel. Some noise filtered up from the street, car doors slamming and the roar of a passing bus.

  The fact that his own godfather had become a turncoat hadn’t persuaded him, he said, to switch to the other side. There was still no need. Plainly, his godfather had covered for him, in spite of the obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He had simply hushed up the fact that Marcello Fava had belonged to Cosa Nostra since he was twenty years old. So why should Fava have crossed over to the other side? There was no need to. No feelings of guilt. He only experienced those later on, towards his wife. For twenty years he had cheated on her with the Mafia. His wife had never known anything, he said, she had never doubted him for a morning. If I say a horse is flying, my wife will believe it.

  But she wasn’t as naive as her husband imagined. No Sicilian woman is naive. She walked to police headquarters when she heard that her husband had been arrested again. She knew that he hadn’t been a victim of the judiciary, innocently persecuted on suspicion of being a thief and a bank robber, but someone who had had the end of his prison sentence sweetened by his bosses when they had paid for the baptisms of his two sons – four hundred guests, very Cosa Nostra. Lobsters and champagne. She knew that when he went with her to mass on Sunday he was only waiting for a sign from his boss. A slight nod of the head and already he was getting up from his pew to discuss a few matters outside – protection money, money from public contracts, bribes, new supermarkets and bingo halls for money laundering, money for mafiosi in jail. The clan’s money was never enough. After communion he sat back down in his seat. She knew he ignored her when she said: ‘I don’t like those people you talk to.’ She said nothing more than that. She knew what it meant when he begged her to go with him to lunch at the boss’s villa. To a christening in Palermo cathedral. To a wedding feast in Mondello, in the Palace Hotel, with real swans swimming in the pool. It would have been a deadly insult to appear without his wife.

  His wife’s dislike of Cosa Nostra didn’t stop her from following him in his flight from the police. A life that Cosa Nostra made as pleasant for him as possible. His brother found him a little villa outside Palermo and a few lads to act as bodyguards, who checked that the coast was clear, who went with him on his motorbike, because that’s the easiest way for a wanted mafioso to get around Palermo. The fullface helmet was his disguise, that and the wigs, the stick-on beards – which didn’t keep the ‘flunkeys’, as he still called the police in those days, from storming the villa. Shots rang out and his wife thought he was injured. While she was looking for him in all the hospitals of Palermo, she didn’t know that they had just been warning shots and he was already in handcuffs at police headquarters. She was pregnant at the time. And lost the child. After a week in solitary, he decided to do the unthinkable. His wife said only: ‘Whatever you do, I’m with you.’

  I have no daughters. That’s something I’d rather not talk about. It’s an open wound for me. Because when I was twenty, I was given a daughter. Who died at birth. I have three dead children. They all died at birth. That’s something my wife is always reminding me about. Because they’re buried in Palermo. And my wife constantly thinks of them, of those dead children. I hope I’ll bring her back to me one day. So that I can do my duty at last.

  When he talked about his three dead children, his eyes welled up with tears. He looked awkwardly in his briefcase for a handkerchief, he bent down to hide his face, and blew his nose noisily into it. He saw the miscarriages as a curse from God. As a punishment for his blasphemous life. Perhaps he was thinking about the people who had wept like children before they were strangled. Perhaps he was thinking of the ones who had died standing up, which is what the men of Cosa Nostra call it when a man of honour doesn’t plead for his life. Perhaps he was thinking about how he had taken part in the funeral of a victim, about how he had straightened the sash on the wreath, looked the family in the eyes and shaken their hands to express his sympathy. Perhaps. And perhaps not. Had he not acted like a soldier?

  I was always very devout. As a child, I was an altar-boy for the Salesians. After that, I drifted away from the church a little, I committed my first burglaries – but I’m still devout even today. As my son is, too. He loves religious processions. When we were still living in Sicily, he wouldn’t miss a procession. Sometimes he copied them at home, he wore a veil and a train like the saints in the procession. He has three hundred figures of the saints at home. He’s taken them all over the place. And he does that even now that he’s eighteen years old and has a girlfriend.

  At the end of the interview, Fava got to his feet and cracked his knuckles. The police woke from their slumbers, one of them looked through the peephole and nodded to the other officers. He hoped his observations had been useful to me, Fava said sheepishly. He awkwardly put his crib sheet back in the briefcase. When he opened it I saw that it was empty, apart from a book: History of the Mafia from 1943 until the Present. I remembered an old bookseller in Palermo, whose shop wasn’t far from the Via della Libertà, telling me that the bosses from the Borgo Vecchio were among her best customers. As soon as she put a new book about the Mafia in her shop window, it sold out straightaway.

  ‘Is there anything about you in that book?’ I asked. And Fava replied: ‘Yes, on page 568.’ He said it like someone who’s managed to get an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

  Then he took his leave of me, very formally, with a small hint of a bow. He seemed relieved. He said: ‘There are people who go through life with their eyes open. And those who live with their eyes closed.’ At last, four officers flanked him and walked him to the street. I had to wait upstairs in the flat until the car he was in had disappeared.

  The two remaining policemen were curious to know whether I’d found the interview interesting. Whether I’d met other mafiosi, and what differences I’d spotted in their personalities. And what Germans know about the Mafia. Then they offered to take me in their car to the nearest taxi rank. Their car looked like a cross between a minibus and an amphibious vehicle, so I asked them if it could drive in water as well.

  ‘We can’t tell you that,’ the policemen said, ‘because then we’d have to kill you.’

  The man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit also cracks his knuckles. We’re already preparing to land in Palermo, the tables are tipped up again, the seatbelt signs are on, and I’m still wondering whether I should speak to him for a moment. But what would I say? ‘Remember me? I’m a journalist and interviewed you once, in Rome.’ Because I don’t think he does remember me. Journalists are never perceived as people. We’re nothing but mirrors that people talk into. You speak into them and in the end an article comes out of it. You remember the name of the newspaper or magazine. Or maybe not. In Italy, at any rate, I’m rarely remembered. And he would have good reason not to remember me, because in returning secretly to Palermo he is putting his new life on the line. His freedom, his status as a collaborator with the forces of law and order, his livelihood, the protection of his family, everything. When a turncoat mafioso returns secretly to Sicily, it doesn’t augur well. In Sicily everyone remembers the career of Baldassare Di Maggio – mafioso, hit man and driver to the boss Totò Riina. As a key witness in the Andreotti trial, Di Maggio had been responsible, among other things, for describing the kiss on the cheek between Andreotti and Totò Riina – one of the more spectacular statements about the close relationship between the politician and the Mafia boss. Later, Di Maggio had returned to Sicily, where, in his home town of San Giuseppe Jato, he would commit a murder – one that had nothing to do with the Andreotti trial but was a
settling of old scores.

  When Di Maggio was arrested for that murder, he provided the excuse that was needed to bring about the collapse of the Andreotti trial. The defence wanted above all to prove that the key witnesses whose statements incriminated Andreotti were not credible. If the witness to the kiss on the cheek was not in fact the turncoat mafioso he claimed to be, but a mafioso who was still committing crimes, even though he was on the witness-protection programme, then it would be a serious error even to listen to his testimony against one of the most important Italian statesmen, let alone take it seriously as incriminating evidence.

  Di Maggio was arrested and thrown off the witness-protection programme. But even then he didn’t deviate from his account of the kiss on the cheek between Totò Riina and Giulio Andreotti.

  Below us, the sea glistens as smooth and viscous as pitch. The plane is already flying at a low altitude and I see the Isola delle Femmine floating in the pitch. The sky is bright with stars, and the mountain, the one I always think we’re going to crash into every time I fly into Palermo, stands out in the moonlight. But before fear can really take hold of me, the plane has already landed.

  As always in Italy, the passengers are getting up and impatiently clearing out the luggage compartments while the plane is still rolling along the runway. When the engines are turned off, everyone crams into the narrow aisle, the two old Sicilians try to push their way to the front with their plastic bags and parcels, the man in the pinstripe suit sticks his unlit cigarillo in his mouth, the woman with the stockings brushes her skirt straight. When the plane door opens, damp, warm air pours in, smelling of Africa.

  We walk across the runway to the airport building; in the pale glow of the floodlights I see the man who was sitting next to me. I watch him furtively as we wait for our bags beside the carousel. He takes his mobile phone out of his briefcase and switches it on. Our bags arrive at the same time. As we plunge into the sea of waiting Sicilians, I almost lose sight of him. But then I see him walking up to a thin man holding up a sign with a name written on it: Mr Berenson. Then he is swallowed up by the night.