Badfellas (9 page)

The rest of the evening might have carried on in a peaceful and happy atmosphere, with nothing to disrupt it, if Fred hadn’t suddenly started having regrets. About everything.

Five characters, all male, stood in a semicircle around the fire, their eyes fixed on the coals, which were refusing to light, despite the dry weather, despite the sophisticated equipment and all the efforts of the master of the house, who was, after all, an old hand when it came to barbecues.

“That’s not the way to do it… You need more kindling, Mr Blake, you’ve put the coal on too soon.”

The speaker had a cap on his head and a beer in his hand. He lived two doors away, his wife had brought an olive loaf, and his children were running around the buffet screaming. Fred gave him a cold smile. Beside him the bachelor who ran the travel agency in the middle of the town took up the ball:

“That’s not the way to do it. I never use coal at all, I do it like an open fire – it takes longer, but you get much better embers.”

“That’s not the way to do it,” added an eminent local councillor. “You’re using firelighters – they’re poisonous, and that’s no joke. And anyway, you can see it doesn’t even work.”

Without realizing it, Fred was proving a universal truth, which goes like this: as soon as one idiot tries to light a fire somewhere, four others will gather round to tell him how to do it.

“We won’t be eating that sausage before tomorrow at this rate,” the last one said, laughing, and he couldn’t resist adding: “You’ll never get anywhere with those bellows – I use an old hairdryer.”

Fred paused for a beat, rubbing his eyebrows, in the grip of a violent and mounting rage. At the most unexpected moments, Giovanni Manzoni, the worst man on earth, took over the body of Fred Blake, artist and local curiosity. When one of the five guys gathered around the fire took it upon himself to suggest that only a bit of white spirit could rescue things, Fred imagined him on his knees begging for mercy. And not just mercy – he was begging to be finished off, released from his pain. Giovanni had been in such situations several times in his life, and he could never forget the very particular moan of a man begging to be killed: a sort of long wail, rather like that of the professional mourning women in Sicily, a song whose notes he could pick out from thousands of others. It wouldn’t have taken him more than five minutes to make this one sing that song – this big relaxed fellow with his arms crossed, standing only inches away, unaware of the fate being prepared for him. The local councillor, for his part, was suffering excruciating torture, crouched in his underwear inside a freezer, like Cassidy, the Irish boss of the fishmongers’ union in New York. The local councillor was doing less well than Cassidy, who, with his head wedged against a pile of chicken breasts, had banged on the inside of the freezer for a good two hours before dying and finally ending the long wait for Corrado Motta and Giovanni, who had passed the time by playing cards on the lid of the freezer.

The man with the cap, unaware of the terrible tortures Fred was planning for him, continued:

“It’ll never take, there must be some old ash in there.”

Fred delved far back into the past: he had been twenty-two when his boss had ordered him to make an example of Lou Pedone, a negotiator for the “five families”, who had allowed the Chinese triads to set up shop on Canal Street in exchange for a big wad of drug money. To carry out the vendetta, and in order to set an example, Giovanni had shown quite exceptional powers of imagination: Lou’s head was found floating in the aquarium of the Silver Pagoda restaurant, on the corner of Mott and Canal. And the most extraordinary thing was that it took several hours for the customers to notice the glassy stare coming from inside the aquarium. Fred, who was now beginning to lose it and had started lighting hundreds of matches under scrunched-up paper, could see the man’s head in the aquarium, with his ridiculous hat floating on the surface. But the ordeal was not over: another man, hitherto silent, grabbed the bellows and took over the whole situation without even consulting Fred, who had already had his virility cast into doubt that afternoon. This time it took a superhuman effort not to grab the miserable man by the hair, press his face onto the grill and stick a kebab skewer through one ear and out the other side.

“Well, well, Mr Blake, you’re probably better at stringing together sentences than making fires. One can’t be good at everything.”

A few steps away, Warren, still trapped in the conversation about American cooking, was asked a question on a subject he had never even thought about.

“So, what makes a genuine hamburger?”

“A genuine hamburger? What do you mean?”

“There must be an original recipe. Do you have to have ketchup? Pickles? Lettuce? Onions? Does the meat always have to be grilled? Do you bite into it, or do you open it up and use a knife and fork? What do you think?”

Warren didn’t think anything, but said what came into his head.

“A true hamburger is fatty if you want it fatty, huge if you want a blowout, full of ketchup if you’re not worried about diabetes, you put onions on if you don’t mind your breath stinking and mix mustard in with the ketchup if you like the colour it makes, plus a salad leaf for the sake of irony. And if you feel like it you can add cheese, grilled bacon, lobster claws and marshmallows, and it’ll be genuine American hamburger, because – us Americans, that’s what we’re like.”

Maggie, for her part, was acting her role admirably; this barbecue was nothing compared to some of the summit conferences she had had to organize on Fred’s orders. Everything went through the wives, who passed the invitation on to their husbands and all concerned. A barbecue at the Manzonis was nothing less than a Mafia summit with chops on the side. Decisions were taken there that Maggie preferred not to know about. Twice she had even welcomed Don Mimino himself, the
capo di tutti i capi
, who never moved unless there was a war between the families. That afternoon there could be no problems, everything would have to take place according to a gentle ritual in an open and friendly atmosphere. She had to be more than just diplomatic, she had to use her sixth sense, keeping an eye on
everything and making sure the men were able to carry out their business discreetly, business which might include sealing one of their own men’s fate in a block of concrete. What could possibly worry her now, so many years later, here in the midst of these French guests who were so amused by their lapses in taste?

Meanwhile the coals had finally caught, putting an end to the sarcastic remarks. The steaks were cooking alongside the sausages, giving out such an appetising smell that the guests started gathering in larger and larger numbers, plates in hands, around the barbecue. Fred was gradually beginning to relax, happy to have lit his fire, despite all the bad will around him. The man with the hat had had a narrow escape; without knowing it he had been within a whisker of a death so hideous that it would have made the peaceful town of Cholong famous. He was even one of the first to taste the meat, and couldn’t resist one more piece of advice:

“It’s good, Monsieur Blake, but perhaps you should have waited until the embers were hotter before putting on the steaks.”

Fred had no choice now – the man with the stupid hat would have to die immediately and in front of everyone.

In New Jersey, the man with the stupid hat would not have survived more than two weeks, he would have been taught to hold his tongue from earliest childhood, or he would have had it cut off with a razor-sharp switchblade – the operation wouldn’t have taken a minute. In New Jersey, faced with real bad men of the Giovanni Manzoni kind, the man with the stupid hat would have bitten back all his sly comments, and would have long since given up looking over his neighbour’s shoulder
purely in order to make tiresome suggestions. In New Jersey, if you had the answers to everything, you had to prove it on the spot, and idle commentators were a rare breed. Giovanni Manzoni grabbed a poker leaning against the grill, clutched it tightly, and waited for the man in the stupid hat to turn round so that he would see death coming as he was being hit full in the face.

And too bad if Fred brought everything down around him, if by killing this man he put his family in danger, too bad if he went back to prison for life. Too bad if, once in prison, his anonymity only lasted twenty-four hours and Don Mimino gave orders to liquidate him. Too bad if the whole Manzoni story got back into the headlines and if Maggie, Belle and Warren didn’t survive the shame and the vengeance. The death and ruin of a family were as nothing compared to Fred’s irresistible urge to silence for ever the man in the stupid hat.

Just at this precise moment a gentle hand landed on Fred’s shoulder. He turned round, ready to hit anyone who stopped the attack.

Quintiliani had arrived. He was upright, strong and reassuring, with the look of a priest. He had seen Fred’s temper rising, and it was something only he could control. He knew very well how to deal with that sort of rage – in fact some of his FBI colleagues saw it as his special gift. For Tommaso Quintiliani, it was not so much a gift as a matter of dealing with ancient demons. In the days when he had hung out with his gang of friends on Mulberry Street, a man’s life was only worth what could be found in his pockets. If he hadn’t been drawn into the ranks of the FBI by some innate good conscience, he would have joined those of the Cosa Nostra with the same steely determination.

“Give me a drink, Fred.”

Fred heaved a sigh of relief. The ghost of Giovanni Manzoni vanished like a bad dream and Frederick Blake, the American writer living in Normandy, reappeared.

“Come and try the sangria, Tom,” he said, dropping the poker.

The party had dragged on and Maggie was in bed, yawning, ready to drop off to sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow. Fred took his pyjamas off the chair by the bed, put them on, lay down next to his wife, kissed her on the forehead and switched off the bedside light. After a moment of silence, he gazed up at the ceiling and said:

“Thanks, Livia.”

He only used her real name when he felt he owed her. Within that thanks, there was a long unspoken sentence that went like this:
Thank you for not leaving me, despite everything you’ve been through, because you know that without you I wouldn’t last long, and thank you too for…
lots of other things that he would rather not say out loud – saying thank you was, on the whole, beyond his strength. He sensed her dropping off to sleep, waited for a moment, and then got out of bed, put on his dressing gown, and crept down to the veranda like a burglar. All the exhaustion of the day had melted away. He sat down in front of the typewriter, turned on the light and reread the last lines of his chapter.

The plumber had twice put off the appointment and Maggie had finally persuaded him, practically on her knees, to come by that morning. However, that same morning her long-awaited appointment in Evreux was finally confirmed. Fred was fed up at the thought of having to deal with a plumber on his own, and took refuge in the veranda.

“Leave the door open – it would be so stupid to miss him,” she said, as she left the house.

So he kept an ear out for the doorbell, and returned to his notes, which would eventually form a complete plan of the second, third and fourth chapters of his memoirs. They went roughly like this:

2.
The
“sciuscià”
years
.

–
My four years working with Jimmy
.

–
The greyhound stadium
.

–
The Schultz haulage company
.

–
The Pearl Street vegetable market
.

–
Profits reinvested in excavation business
.

Description of people I worked with at the time: Curtis Brown, Ron Mayfield, the Pastroni brothers
.

3.
The
“a faticare”
years

–
The front company, Excavation Works and Partners, and its subsidiaries
.

–
The local girls at Bonito Square
.

–
The trip to Miami (non-interference pact and consequences
).

Plus: Little Paulie, Mishka, Amedeo Sampiero
.

4.
The Family years
.

–
Meeting Livia
.

–
Don Mimino
.

–
The Esteban contract
.

–
Loss of the East End
.

Plus: Romana Marini, Ettore Junior, Cheap J
.

He was in his stride now and felt ready to press on to the next chapters, but just then the doorbell rang, cutting him off in full flow – another reason to hate the miserable workman waiting behind the door. Fred began to miss the good old days, when he had been the hero of the New Jersey building unions. By bending and intimidating the biggest businesses in the area to fall in with his family’s interests, Giovanni Manzoni had unintentionally advanced those of various unions, one of which was the plumbers’. As a result bathroom fittings and general upkeep at the Manzoni home in Newark were henceforth maintained to a standard worthy of the White House.