The Four Corners of Palermo (22 page)

“A 10-79. It’s absurd. Over.”

“Give me the location.”

“Piazza Giulio Cesare. Over.”

“Sorry, but Vela 2, where’s that?”

“
Dottore
, come on, the train station. Over.”

The guy who covered the political beat, Pippo Suraci, looked up from his Olympia typewriter, stopped pounding the keys, and, speaking to no one in particular, said: “I wonder what happened at the station?” Then he went back to writing.

The news editor lit an MS cigarette and waved me over with his lighter. I stepped closer. I’d heard the police radio, too. A 10-79 was code for a request for a medical examiner: a murder had been committed. And an “absurd” one, too, according to what the officer on the scene had just said.

My boss waved his lighter, pointing to the door of the newsroom. His lips were inhaling smoke. He didn’t even have time to say: “Go.”

“Okay, I’m going. I’ve got a pocketful of phone tokens, and if I find a working phone I’ll let you know.”

“The train station is the only place in Palermo where you can find working phone booths. As soon as you get there, give me a call, because we’re about to put the paper to bed. And take a photographer with you,” my boss said, chewing on the smoke.

I called up to the photographers’ room. Filippo Lombardo answered and a few seconds later he was downstairs at the front desk of the building. I told him to hop on the back of my Vespa, and in eight minutes flat we were at Piazza Giulio Cesare: I’d never known that was the name of the piazza in front of the train station.

“Be a beat reporter, you’ll learn all about the world,” my first editor in chief had told me. And now I was learning.

Three squad cars with their flashing blue lights, a dozen policemen, an ambulance: all of them clustering around a gray Ford Escort abandoned in the middle of the piazza, theoretically double parked. I spotted the
“dottore,”
Antonio Gualtieri. Even the chief of the mobile squad had come out to see.

We exchanged a quick greeting. Filippo mounted his flashgun. It was noon on a winter day: the gray sky cast a flat, ugly light on the scene. The piazza was the usual picture of chaos: a group of taxis; three horse-drawn carriages, their drivers wielding whips; cars parked like so many pickup sticks. A wave of humanity that washed into and out of one of the farthest-flung train stations on the entire Italian peninsula. I knew that piazza: every trip I took back then was by train and followed the rule of “plus fourteen.” Paris? Eighteen hours from Rome, plus fourteen more to reach Rome from Palermo. Amsterdam? Twenty hours, plus fourteen. I saw lots of Europe, I met plenty of people: it wasn’t a geographic handicap, it was just the distance necessary to understand the journey.

“What’s happened, Antonio?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

Filippo was behind me, and he test-fired his flashgun. Gualtieri opened the passenger door of the Ford Escort. There was something the size of a soccer ball on the front seat, concealed under a newspaper.

Gualtieri lifted the paper and two eyes, a nose, and a mouth appeared, the color of antiqued leather. The effect was straight out of Madame Tussaud’s, but both Gualtieri and I knew very well that wax had never been popular in Palermo. The city had always preferred lead.

The man’s head was sitting on the practically brand-new fabric upholstery of the Ford Escort’s passenger seat. There wasn’t a drop of blood anywhere around it. The eyes were closed, the mouth pursed in a whisper, the hair tousled but nicely arranged around a face that looked to be about forty. That head would gladly have spoken. Perhaps words of love, or else a curse.

I noticed how Filippo’s flashgun lit up the car’s interior. Then Gualtieri led me around to the rear of the Escort.

“Cucuzza, open the trunk.”

The officer obeyed. In the trunk was a well-dressed corpse: a dark-brown three-piece suit, black shoes, a shirt that must have once been white. The tie lay beside the body, since the neck around which it had once been knotted was no longer there. The corpse had been arranged to fit in that tiny space: the Ford Escort had won the title of “Car of the Year” for 1981, but it was still a compact sedan. There was not a trace of blood in the trunk, either.

“Antonio, what ideas have you come up with?” I asked Gualtieri.

“Must have been Robespierre,” he said with a laugh, and I joined in to jolly him along.

“I don’t remember any beheadings in Palermo,” I said. I’d been working the crime beat for almost five years, so I considered myself a veteran.

The chief of the mobile squad looked at me the way you look at an abstract painting: with interest, but with some misgivings about the artist’s ability.

“We don’t even know what his name is. Before we talk about precedents, we ought to identify him.”

“I’ll come by your office later on.”

“All right.”

The only reason he agreed was that he knew my father was a Juventus fan—a Juventino—in addition to rooting for Palermo. When I told him that, the first time he agreed to see me, I made him happy. He immediately trotted out the collection of pennants that Giampiero Boniperti had given him when he was a young officer working the Turin stadium. Half the population of Palermo, by tradition, rooted for Juve as their second team. This was the legacy of a mysterious culture that long ago drove Sicilian pastry chefs, descendants of the geniuses who invented the
cassata
in the tenth century, to create a chocolate cake that’s better than the Austrian Sacher torte and call it the
“torta Savoia.”
A Savoy torte in Palermo. A form of
contrappasso
, like Dante’s poetic justice, but gastronomic in nature: much as if the Milanese, instead of inventing their renowned cutlet, had invented
michette con il kebab
.

I went back to the paper. I reported to my news editor, who still had time to do a new layout of the front page. Filippo handed over the photograph, still wet with developer and stop bath. A photograph perfectly poised between the Middle
Ages and the late twentieth century, worthy of a latter-day Bosch: a man’s head, perfectly bloodless, sitting on a black-and-white checkered car seat, surrounded by dashboard, stick shift, steering wheel; the interior of an automobile, the exterior of a nightmare. Above the full-page photograph, a banner headline screamed: “The Mystery of the Severed Head.”

Half an hour later, the newsies invaded the city waving copies of the paper, fresh from the press, as they shouted the lullaby of Palermo:
“How many died, how many died.”

At the medical examiner’s office, the two parts of the body were temporarily reassembled. Dr. Filiberto Quasazza, head of the office, authorized an autopsy and a series of photographs of the head. They were able to ascertain that the man had been strangled to death and then decapitated. The tool used to remove the head had been as sharp as a guillotine, whatever it was. Dr. Quasazza’s assistants joked as they stood around the marble autopsy table, the most educated of the group making references to the Terror and wondering if “terrorists” were therefore followers of the French revolutionaries. The pictures taken in the morgue were then sent immediately to police headquarters.

After looking through a thousand or so mug shots, at six that evening, Gualtieri’s mobile squad ascertained that the head had once belonged to Giovanni Neglia, born in Porticello on March 5, 1934, with previous convictions for theft.

“
Dottore
, we’ve got a name,” said Inspector Zoller, setting down a typed sheet of paper on the desk of the chief of the mobile squad.

I had just walked into the office a few minutes earlier.

“
Buona sera
, Inspector,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Good work, boys: you were quick,” Gualtieri commented.

“It’s all written down here, you only need to read it,” Zoller added, pointing to the sheet of paper. With every word, his salt-and-pepper mustache rose and fell, as if in a children’s cartoon.

Gualtieri waved him out with a smile.

“Antonio, who does that head belong to?” I asked.

“Let me see … Neglia. Giovanni Neglia. A two-bit thief.”

“Do you know what
neglia
, or really
negghia
, means in the Palermo dialect?”

“No.”

“A good-for-nothing, an incompetent,” I explained.

“Too bad for him.”

“What else does it say?”

“Previous convictions, born in Porticello in 1934, married, father of two daughters.”

“Would you give me the address?”

“Via Perpignano 36. His wife is named Cosima.”

At the door on my way out, Gualtieri made the sign of the horns with his fingers to ward off bad luck, slapped me on the back, and practically shoved me out of his office.

Tomorrow I’d start work on the severed head of Signor Good-for-Nothing.

“Venditti is whiny,” said Serena.

“No, he’s romantic,” Lilli replied.

“All romantics are whiny.”

“Oh, you’re horrible.”

“And you’re a romantic.”

As I walked into the apartment, I happened to pick up this fragment of conversation. Serena hated anything that smacked of sugar, while Lilli was as sweet as, say, Antonello Venditti’s hit
“Le tue mani su di me.”
Perhaps I was starting to fall in love with her. I loved her blonde hair, the look in her eyes that reminded me of the Sicilian sea. Her soft, yielding hips. The simple love that she had for being in love: she’d cuddle next to me at night and watch the stupidest programs on TV; she’d lavish me with compliments, whatever I cooked for her; she wanted me to read poems aloud. And she was completely unrestrained in her lovemaking. Lilli was twenty-two years old and was enrolled in college majoring in literature, but she’d never even taken a final exam, much less flunked one. Her father, a very well-to-do commercial accountant, heir to a Palermitan family with only onequarter nobility—and of Bourbon descent, to make things worse—had set her up with her own little toy store to run. We’d met at a New Year’s party thrown by my sister. She’d shown up with her boyfriend, a tall guy with a mélange wool turtleneck. I decided that one thing you should never do is welcome in the New Year with an indecisive color: it shows a lack of respect for the future. I ignored him and went over to my sister, who was greeting the blonde girl who had come to the party with the mélange turtleneck.

“This is Lilli.”

She was wearing a skintight dress that allowed me to admire her curves, which were described in great detail by the charcoal-gray fabric of her dress. She had a warm beauty that occupied a perfect middle ground between Sicily’s Norman DNA and its Phoenician ancestry. She turned to look at me and immersed her blue eyes in mine, scalding them until they
were fully cooked, a couple of pan-fried eggs, over easy. I took her left hand delicately and held it in mine, without a word. The strangeness of that gesture forced her to take another look at me. I returned her gaze without flinching, and with a smile I told her who I was and what I did, without ever releasing her hand, which I could feel growing warmer. Her hand didn’t shake mine off; it curled up in my palm, or at least that’s what I thought. I found out I’d been right at three that morning, when I suggested we abandon the mélange turtleneck to its fate. She accepted. Later, at the apartment, we’d talk about our lives, kneading them together like so much dough.

“Okay, girls. Just don’t fight over the music, please.”

“I never fight,” said Serena, glaring daggers at me.

“Ciao, amore mio.”
Lilli kissed me softly on the lips.

“Where’s Fabrizio?” I asked.

“He’s on his way, he had a lesson,” Serena replied.

I looked at the clock. It was eight.

“Shall we go out when he gets here?”

The two young women exchanged a glance filled with questions. Cold out? Tired? How to get there? Take Fabri’s Renault 4? And what would they eat?

Lilli said: “You decide.”

Serena corrected her: “No. I couldn’t say, let’s wait for Fabrizio.”

Cicova had listened to the conversation curled up on the sofa. Now and then he opened an eye. He stretched out and enjoyed the first few notes of “In a Sentimental Mood.” He arched his back and yawned. Then he came toward me, with a rolling gait.