Sicilian Tragedee (30 page)

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Authors: Ottavio Cappellani

BOOK: Sicilian Tragedee
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On the Terrace of the Top Floor of the Una Palace Hotel
On the terrace of the top floor of the Una Palace Hotel, Pirrotta has asked to be seated in the breeziest corner where the drapes are flapping around him.
The terrace on the top floor of the Una Palace Hotel is decorated in oriental-chic.
The bar is deserted.
There are no waiters and no bartender.
In front of Pirrotta, there’s a huge glass of Campari with a slice of orange impaled on the edge of the glass.
 
 
Mister Turrisi’s Aston Martin, laying rubber, takes the curve that leads from Via Passo Gravina down to Piazza Stesicoro and boldly slams into a garbage bin.
The Aston Martin backs up coolly, disengages, and looks for a parking space.
Mister Turrisi leaps out of the car like a demon, slams the door, takes a quick look at the headlight that’s hanging down like a gouged-out eyeball, and heads down Via Etnea with a stride that echoes down the Baroque corridors.
 
 
Pirrotta had said he wanted some
privacy
.
His boys, in front of the elevator, are stopping the hotel’s clients and sending them away, telling them the bar is closed for cleaning.
From the windows you can see the roofs of Catania.
Pirrotta is wearing his sunglasses.
He’s immobile.
The only things in motion are the voluminous, pure-white drapes flapping in the breeze.
 
 
The elevator door opens and there’s Mister Turrisi combing his hair in the mirror.
He looks distractedly at Pirrotta’s boys.
He finishes combing his hair.
Even though his heart is in turmoil, even though he knows he’s responsible for a fucking mess, even though he hasn’t the slightest idea how to resolve the matter, even though an hour ago he had showed up at Pietroburger and Pietro had told him that Pirrotta wanted to see him at the Una Palace Hotel, at the bar on the top floor, even though he had practically had a panic attack because Pietro had specified, “They said you should come alone. You can’t even take me,” even though he had messed up the Aston Martin and there was a headlight hanging down, you must never let the boys see you are nervous, and above all, not your enemy’s boys. “Reserve is the basis of all elegance,” they had explained to him in London back in the days when he would begin to shriek like a washerwoman at the first obstacle.
The elevator doors close under the contemptuous gaze of Pirrotta’s boys.
Mister Turrisi, comb in hand, is terribly annoyed.
 
 
Pirrotta takes a slow sip of his Campari.
He puts down the glass and meticulously adjusts the orange slice to keep it nice and upright.
He sits back in his chair and is once again immobile.
 
 
Turrisi comes in, out of breath and buttoning his jacket.
Pirrotta doesn’t even look at him.
Turrisi looks around.
He looks at a chair.
He unbuttons his jacket and sits down.
He stares at Pirrotta.
Pirrotta is silent.
The truth is that Pirrotta too has no idea what to say.
He might have a glimmer, but he’s awaiting confirmation.
After a few seconds, Turrisi turns his head to look for a waiter. He realizes that the bar is deserted.
He looks at Pirrotta’s Campari.
With the orange slice.
Pirrotta did this specially to show who’s boss. I have a glass of Campari and you have fuck-all.
Turrisi nods.
He nods because he’s caught his drift, because he’s a diplomatic whiz, because he knows that in these cases you have to nod, particularly when you’ve been responsible for a fuckup like that with Paino.
Paino! Turrisi had better not start thinking about him or he’s going to start chewing his fingers.
He settles himself in his chair.
When Turrisi is nervous, there’s this thing that he can never get comfortable in his chair, and he blames those English tailors.
 
 
Now it’s Pirrotta’s turn to nod.
Pirrotta picks up the glass, takes a slow and noisy suck letting the ice rattle against his dentures, puts the glass down, nods again, looks at Turrisi, and says, “So what did you have to say to me?”
Turrisi sighs.
Pirrotta had summoned
him
, he was sucking his Campari, and he’s even asking him what he had to say to him.
 
 
Betty in beach attire, with a sarong that opens to her armpit so as to offer a glimpse of her nipple, thong sandals with a sado-masochistic heel, walks through the living room in front of her mother, who’s flipping through a magazine.
“Is Papa here?”
Wanda, who doesn’t look up from her magazine, signals
no
with her head.
“Oh, all right, if you see him would you give him a message that he’s an asshole?”
Wanda, her eyes glued to the magazine, nods.
Betty goes off
tick-tack-ticking
nervously on her heels. “I’m going to the beach to do some blow jobs. That’ll teach all of you.”
Wanda raises her eyes from the magazine, shakes her head as if in admiration, and says, “So you’ve just come up with the vindictive slut? Shit, before you got there, nobody had ever thought of it!” and turns her gaze back to her reading.
“Go fuck yourself.”
 
 
“I …” says Turrisi, and finds himself wordless.
Pirrotta nods as if to invite him to continue.
“Can I speak frankly, Signor … Mister Pirrotta?”
Pirrotta jerks up his right hand, brings it toward his sunglasses, and—so it appears—studies the nail of his little finger to see if the manicurist has filed it correctly. “Be my guest.”
“I sent you a
pizzino
…”
Pirrotta turns stiff as a board.
“And you, with all due respect before the blessed Virgin, consented to let me go out with the highly esteemed Signorina Betty. No?”
Pirrotta abandons his fingernail.
Sure, he consented.
Shit, you propose to get Betty off my balls, you propose a remedial matrimony for the Ispica business, and what do I do, I don’t consent? “And who told you I didn’t consent?”
“What do you mean, who told me? Signorina Elisabetta.”
Luckily Pirrotta’s wearing sunglasses, otherwise his eyeballs would have popped out and fallen into the glass with the Campari. “Shit, just like her mother!” says Pirrotta, giving himself a slap on the knee.
Holy Mary, a slut in the great tradition of her mother!
Turi remembers it well, how he used to drive by in the cement-mixer and that super-slut Wanda didn’t even look up at him. Until the day, however, when certain rumors began to circulate about what Turi did, or did not, do with the cement-mixer.
Down in Civita, praise God, people never minded their own fucking business, and when someone disappeared (either because he got drunk, or went whoring in Messina, or because he really disappeared and they never found him again), you could bet that in Civita they would say, “Well, maybe that one ended up in Riddu’s cement-mixer.”
And that’s when Wanda began to look at him in a different way! Wanda, that slut, and her daughter too.
One morning at the bar, it was about seven, and Riddu had been working all night and was just downing a Fernet-Branca before turning in, well, along comes Wanda with a flowered miniskirt and her legs making an X, and she says, without Riddu having to ask her fuck-all, “You’re that guy that shows off outside my house? My name is Wanda and if you want to know why I’m called that you need to know I have the same name as Wanda Osiris.”
Then she walked off like she was offended, worse than if he’d given her a little pat on the ass. (In Civita, that’s how the females act when they’re in love: they go and get offended, I don’t know how they do with you.)
And who the fuck was this stupid Wanda Osiris? Riddu, who worked from morning to night, it’s not like he had time to watch variety shows. Osiris, he later learned, was a TV starlet and she must have been famous, if they had named Wanda after her.
And then they say you
learn
to be a whore.
Anyway, after that encounter, Riddu had really started showing off in front of Wanda’s house.
“But what does the respected Lady Mother have to do with any of this?” asks Turrisi.
Pirrotta looks at Turrisi.
Turrisi, to tell the truth, has too dumb a face for you to be able to explain to him the intimate female soul of a woman who’s in the grip of a hysteric pussy fit.
Fuck, you can really see that Turrisi, he’s never been married in his life!
What the fuck does the mother have to do with it, he asks.
And how the fuck could you explain to him that Betty is even more of a slut than her mother?
“My daughter is as pure as the driven snow. Just like her mother,” says Pirrotta, to be on the safe side.
Will You Please Tell Me What the Fuck Is Going On?
“Will you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”
In his villa deep in the lemon groves of the Trapani countryside (acquired for practically nothing from Barone Gibuado, who had some problems, he had, the baron), on the other side of the island from Catania, Melo Vaccalluzzo, wearing an ample California-style cotton shirt printed with palms and surfers, a pair of pants cut off at the calf and held to his legs with elastic, Nike basketball shoes, and a chain with the medal of the Palermo soccer team, is studying the healing process of his latest tattoo—a Chinese dragon on his left forearm that the tattoo artist had sold him as a symbol of the Samurai power of the Japanese Yakuza gangs.
Melo Vaccalluzzo is having some problems with the healing process because he’s seventy-three years old and if Viagra is shrinking the skin of his prick (his wife Saretta says that Viagra has damaged his gray matter), the skin on his forearm continues to be loose, thin and bony as he is.
“Pirrotta and Turrisi have started playing the dickheads,” says Paolino, who’s instead wearing the regulation blue suit the boys wear.
“What’s happening, those little jerks want to step on my dick?”
Melo Vaccalluzzo, son of the Camorra boss Gennaro Russo, had been adopted by Salvatore Vaccalluzzo when Gennaro, they found him on ice with the tuna fish in the port of Naples. Salvatore Vaccalluzzo, who at the time was just getting into the cocaine coming from America, decided to take the little boy and make him his son, he raised him as a Sicilian, he gave him his surname, and before he died he had regretted it all, although it was too late.
Melo, who has inherited the income, status, and privileges of his adoptive father, still breaks out in Neapolitan, even though he struggles without much success to speak Sicilian.
“It’s
’o petrolio
,” says Paolino, who because he talks to Vaccalluzzo all the time has begun to take on Camorra inflections.
“
’O petrolio?
What the fuck are they doing with oil if we’re still discussing it in the regional assembly?”
“They’re moving ahead with the job.”
“What oil are we talking about? When we still don’t know whether this business is going ahead or whether we should keep on cultivating carob trees in Ispica. And what do they think, that Virtude is the same guy he once was? These jerks from Catania had better take it easy. In this
petrolio
business we first have to hear what the Americans have to say, and secondly, even if these guys pick up all the land, we still get ninety percent. And they’re blowing people away for ten percent?”
“Don Melo, these guys from Catania are, they think they are … who knows what they think? And excuse me, but ten percent of
’o petrolio
isn’t exactly the same as ten percent of fake Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts.”
“Right. So what’s the point?”
“They’ve opened an investigation.”
“Who?”
“Who, who, Don Melo, the magistrates.”
Vaccalluzzo spits out the seed of a grape he is eating. “What, they gone crazy?”
“They got two dead there.”
“Yeah, I know how many there are. Think I don’t know how to count?”
Paolino looks down.
This thing that it always has to be him to go and talk with Vaccalluzzo is getting really fucking annoying.
“I mean
them
. They gone nuts? They don’t know that we don’t
do
homicide anymore? They think we’re muggers?”
Paolino doesn’t know what the fuck to say, he merely raises his shoulders. This fuckhead Vaccalluzzo, who has to stay on the terrace because he wants to get a tan on his dick-face, and
he’s
wearing a dark suit and sweltering in the heat.
“Right. So we have to take a trip to Catania. Did they close San Berillo?”
“Yes, Don Melo. There’s nothing left but the transvestites.”
“And what am I supposed to do with drag queens?”
“No, sorry, what I meant to say is that there are the clubs.”
“The what?”
“The clubs.”
“Okay, so we go to the clubs. When we put on the funeral for those two little jerks, we want everyone to know that Carmelo Vaccalluzzo is in Catania. We’re in favor of law and order. Everyone needs to know that, both the families and the magistrates.”
Vaccalluzzo stands up and scratches his ass in such a satisfying way that the elastic on his pants rides up from his calf to his knee.
“That way the magistrates will go back to giving interviews on
the nightly news and stop busting our balls,” says Paolino with the smirk of a man who thinks he’s clever.
Vaccalluzzo freezes, interrupting his ass-scratching in midair. He gives him a dirty look and says, “You, show some respect for the magistrates.”

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