The Four Corners of Palermo (15 page)

“That’s me.”

“Let’s continue: tell me briefly the content of your complaint.”

“My husband and I, my ex-husband even if we aren’t yet legally divorced, his name is Vito Carriglio; well, my husband and I had agreed that he could see them twice a month, Saturday and Sunday. He picked them up last Saturday, at ten in the morning, and today is Wednesday, and I still don’t know anything about him or about my children.”

“What are the children’s names?”

“Giuseppe Carriglio, Salvatore Carriglio, and Costanza Carriglio: twelve, ten, and six years old.”

“Have you gone to look at your husband’s place of residence?”

“Of course.”

Rosaria Savasta shot the human mountain that sat before her an angry glare: you should never question the intelligence of a Sicilian woman. Especially if the woman in question is the daughter of the mob boss Giuseppe Savasta, aka “Tempesta,” and she’s turning to the police, thus breaking one of the most inviolable taboos of Cosa Nostra.

The inspector limited himself to taking notes and translating into bureaucratic jargon the fury that the woman was emitting from her ash-gray eyes. A quarter of an hour later, as the bells of the Arab-Norman cathedral rang out the noon hour, Rosaria Savasta was signing the criminal complaint denouncing the disappearance of her three children. She attached the three
photographs she had brought with her, anticipating the request that the police were about to make: the daughter of a mob boss always knows what the police are thinking.

At six that evening the head of the mobile squad, Antonio Gualtieri, confirmed that earlier that day a woman had filed a criminal complaint concerning the disappearance of three minors.

“Are they named Carriglio?” I asked immediately.

Gualtieri said nothing at first.

“How do you know that? Did one of my men tell you about it?”

“It’s an odd story. I received an anonymous phone call.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Come straight over and let’s talk about it.”

The chief of the mobile squad wasn’t interested in commenting on the return to play of the world soccer champions Dino Zoff, Antonio Cabrini, and Paolo “Pablito” Rossi. The game in question was a tougher one.

At 8:30 that evening, after an unspecified number of espressos that would keep me awake until much later that night, we came to the following agreement: I’d tell Gualtieri everything I found out about the case, and he would give me an exclusive account of the actual developments of the investigation. I had a direct line to the anonymous tipster, and my reward for that would be learning everything before the other journalists. I went home feeling satisfied.

Fabrizio was playing his guitar, practicing a piece by Villa-Lobos—a piece that involved an arpeggio that would
have sorely tested Houdini. Serena was curled up on the sofa, next to a designer lamp that illuminated her corner of the room: she was reading
The Red and the Black
. Cicova was roaming around the living room in search of any olfactory trail that might lead to food.

All in all, a quiet, bourgeois setting.

“Where have you been?” Fabrizio asked, halting the motion of his fingers on the strings.

“Police headquarters, something boring.”

Serena lifted her eyes and looked at me.

“That’s good. If it had been something melancholy, you’d be in big trouble,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Listen to what Stendhal has to say.” She sat up straight, with the posture of a radio announcer, and started reading with her soft “r”: “If you are melancholy, it is because you lack something, because you have failed in something.
That means showing one’s inferiority
; if, on the other hand, you are bored, it is only what has made an unsuccessful attempt to please you, which is inferior.” Then she laughed. “All right, Sicilians, what’s for dinner?”

Villa-Lobos was put away in the guitar case, and I went into the kitchen to open a can of Petreet for Cicova. Then I put a pot of pasta water on to boil.

“Aglio, olio e muddica atturrata,”
I shouted, so they could hear me in the living room. Pasta with garlic, olive oil, and toasted breadcrumbs.

“
Grazie
, journalist,” Serena cried in a loud, clear voice.

“If you want, I’m glad to
atturrari la muddica
,” said Fabrizio, strolling into the kitchen. It was a matter of slowly toasting some breadcrumbs in a skillet, with a little salt, some olive oil,
and, in accordance with a modification I’d made to the recipe two years earlier, a light grating of nutmeg. The breadcrumbs were toasted till they were a dark brown. Then you sprinkled them instead of Parmesan cheese over Tomasello pasta cooked al dente, pasta already flavored with the oil used to sauté, long and low, the garlic and the chopped parsley. I accepted his offer to help. We opened a bottle of Corvo white wine.

After dinner, Simona called. She was a friend of my sister’s, and she wanted me to read the beginning of a novel she’d written. I told her to swing by right away, if she wanted. The first few pages were a little boring, but—luckily—not melancholy. I told her it was really great, and her face lit up. After that we made love, and it was sort of sweet.

The next morning, at a quarter to seven, I made breakfast for everyone: coffee, tea, Stella long-life milk, Oro Saiwa cookies, and an open box of Pavesini cookies. I left three mugs on the kitchen table.

While they were still sleeping, I was back on the hunt for Vito Carriglio. Or at least for his wife.

“What did the head of the mobile squad tell you?”

“We can work together. We have an understanding. They’ll tell us everything they have, and we’ll tell them everything we have.”

“What do you know about these people?”

“She’s the daughter of a guy who’s supposed to be a mob boss. He, the husband, is half a
malacarne
. A Mafia underling, at the very most.”

“And just how can it be that the daughter of a mob boss is talking to the police?”

“An act of contempt toward her husband. If she’d just turned to her family it would have been normal; setting the police after him, after this half a
malacarne
, is a terrible punishment.”

“Then get busy. I’d like to publish the first article today.”

The news editor was leafing through the pages of our main rival, a morning paper. An old-fashioned, conventional broadsheet, which everyone in Palermo looked at for obituaries and wedding announcements: the only two objective parameters to measure the success of a media outlet. We were an afternoon paper, smaller in format, more socially engaged, more combative, smarter, and therefore poorer. A Dickensian poverty: proud and honest.

I set out in search of Rosaria Savasta. The chief of the mobile squad had given me a Xerox of the complaint, with all her information. I found Via Ettore li Gotti on the city map.

Acqua dei Corsari. Just a short distance from the seafront along which Via Messina Marine ran, the coast road that every Saturday of my childhood I drove down with my family in our car, my father, my mother, and my sister, to go to our tiny weekend house in Porticello. I remember the rocky beaches and then the garbage along the Statale, the highway, just outside of Palermo. But at the end of that drive, surrounded by orchards of lemon and orange trees, after we’d passed through villages with names that meant nothing to me—Ficarazzi, Ficarazzelli—we’d come to my own private paradise. The tiny house on the water, with the waves crashing beneath the window of the bedroom where my sister and I slept. That was where I learned everything I know about life: how to swim, how to sail a boat, how to fish, how to protect myself from jellyfish, how to spearfish, how to gut a fish,
how to kiss a girl on the wave-swept rocks, how to build a
strummula
—a handmade top that you spin with a length of twine—how to look up at the stars over the water by night, when the lights of the world we lived in, back in the mid-sixties, were so inadequate and faint that they didn’t interfere with the daydreams—or nightdreams—of someone trying to find the constellations.

I climbed aboard my Vespa and headed back down that road.

Via Ettore li Gotti was a U-shaped street that ran from Via Messina Marine back to Via Messina Marine. An elbow lined with unsightly buildings from the fifties. Number 11 was a two-story apartment building with crumbling balconies. There was just one buzzer on the main door, with no name by it. I rang the bell. A woman’s voice asked who I was. I told her my name: I wanted to talk about the three children.

The only answer was silence.

“Signora Savasta, I really do think I could help you.”

The click of the door buzzing open was the final answer.

The whole building belonged to the Savasta-Carriglio family, probably more to the Savasta side than to the Carriglio side.

The staircase smelled of formaldehyde cleaner. The handrail was made of anodized metal. A petite woman with a sharp-edged, angular face was waiting on the upstairs landing. She studied me as I climbed the last steps leading up to the second floor.

“Signora Savasta?”

“Who are you?”

I told her my name a second time, followed by: “I’m a journalist; I know something about the disappearance of your children.”

“Ah”: a sound that might mean
Please come in
.

The front hall was dark. I walked in and she closed the door.

“Nothing, it’s just a journalist,” she said with a glance toward an adjoining room.

“Ah,” replied the voice of an older woman.

Then Signora Savasta took another look at me, a less suspicious one this time; this look was nothing more than an invitation to join her in the living room.

From the windows you could see the building across the way: taller, uglier. An oil painting of a clown adorned the wall behind an enormous sofa in the Louis Philippe style. The coffee table in front of the sofa was covered with crayon drawings on construction paper. A pencil case lay beside the drawings. A large television set, in the corner, seemed to evoke the evenings that the kids spent watching it.

The woman, with a slight jut and lift of her chin, directed me to have a seat on the fake Louis Philippe sofa.

“Grazie.”

“Now tell me what you know and what you want to find out.”

If she was angular before, she was razor-sharp now.

“Signora Savasta, I’ve received an anonymous phone call about your children.”

“And what did the person say?” she asked without revealing a thing.

“That Vito Carriglio has arranged for his three children to disappear.”

“That’s something I already know.”

“Yes, but the person called before you went to police headquarters.”

“That damned bastard of a husband of mine,” she murmured.

It was starting to dawn on the woman: someone else was in the know.

“Exactly what words did they use?” she asked.

“They said that Vito Carriglio ‘
ha fatto scomparsi
’ his three children.
Disappeared
them.”

“Three days ago …
 Disappeared
them …”