Malavita (22 page)

Bongusto, after crossing the playground, went into the gymnasium, where he yelled a few obscenities, which echoed around the space. He rolled a cigarette and began a tour of the equipment; he hung from the railings, tried to climb a fifteen-foot knotted rope, inspected the shelves full of football shirts; then he picked up a basketball and examined its profiling. He thought it looked incredibly like a world globe. The strange thing was that Nick had never held a ball before. He had watched hundreds of games over many years. He had waited for young basketball players at the entrance to playgrounds, in order to offer them all kinds of substance in pill or sachet form, but he had never joined them for a bit of shooting practice. Later in the arenas, he had organized the betting and watched the stars in action, he had even got to know some of them, at times when he had been in charge of bending them or scaring them shitless, depending on the instructions he had been given. He knew the rules and the players better than anyone, and he could have been a player himself, with his physique, his height, those huge platter-shaped hands, that shaved head. And yet he had never felt the rough rubbery texture of that red ball between his hands. He held it now and took it out to the basketball court in the playground, stood at the top of the key and took a deep last puff of his cigarette stub. He had a difficult choice before him: either he could shoot the first basket of his life, or he could remain the only American never to score once. Joey watched him through the window striking a basketball player's pose, and whistled encouragement.

Paul Gizzi and Julio Guzman, for their part, felt lost in a ghost town, wandering around empty streets past shuttered shops. They had never seen streets like these, narrow and slightly sloping, edged with couch grass and ivy, with branches of apple trees leaning over the walls, fragrant shady streets with unpronounceable names. They stopped in front of the only shop whose name they understood: SOUVENIRS.

Gizzi, at forty, had retained his bad-boy look. He had straight, short, pale-brown hair, with a quiff in the middle of his head, hazel eyes and a dimple in his chin. He took a little camera, which he always carried with him, out of the inside pocket of his green jacket, pointed it at a little white ceramic well and took photos of it from several angles.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Guzman asked.

“Can't you see? I want a souvenir of a souvenir. I know someone who'll like that.”

Guzman, a chunky little bulldog-like figure, who had been impatient since birth, grabbed the butt of his rifle and hit the window, smashing it with a few blows.

“There you are, take it.”

“Guzman, you're sick.”

“Me, the sick one?”

Gizzi had taken the photo for his sister, Alma, who was fifteen years older than him, who had remained a spinster because of a fiancé who had left town when he heard that the Gizzis had very close links with the Staten Island family. A little reluctantly he picked the object out of the broken glass and blew the dust off. He could already see Alma's smile.

Franck Rosello, on the Place de la Libération, his usual taciturn self, was wandering around the stands, unused to such activity. He stopped for a moment in front of a display of pottery and plaster figures representing religious or bucolic figures. Then, seeing all the children stuffing themselves with sweet things, he took a fancy to a red toffee apple dripping with caramel. Without forgetting the ever present possibility of running into his old boss, Manzoni himself, he made sure none of his colleagues could see him approaching the candy van. He was a childhood friend of Matt's, adopted by Don Mimino's family and brought up as a Gallone. He had developed his talent as a sharpshooter in Giovanni's gang, and had become a specialist in the elimination of witnesses. He had thus been instrumental in the cancellation of several trials and in saving the skins of several high-up bosses of the Cosa Nostra. The brotherhood was indebted to him and treated him like a hero. He was paid by the sack-load for each contract, and had never spent a single day behind bars; he had a clean sheet despite twenty years of loyal service. His head count included several famous snitches, such as Cesare Tortaglia and Pippo l'Abruzzese; he had only had one failure, and that was Giovanni Manzoni. If the circumstances were right and Matt was planning a long-distance shot, Franck would get a second chance. His mouth stuffed with toffee apple, he stopped in front of the shooting stall, which reminded him of the one at the funfair in Atlantic City, where he had been born.

“Three euros for five genuine bullets,” the man said. “You can win ten to fourteen points with each shot, fifty if you hit the red, and a hundred if you hit the bull's-eye. Four hundred points, you get a teddy bear. You American?”

Franck only understood the last word and put a five-euro note on the counter; he picked up a rifle and took aim. Without adjusting his aim, he pulled the trigger five times. The man showed him four scattered holes, the fifth having gone off the target. The next time, Franck was able to correct the parallax caused by a slight curve in the barrel and achieve a total of four hundred and fifty points.

The stall-keeper hesitated before surrendering to the evidence. Four hundred and fifty? At a second go? Nobody had ever had such a score. Even he, with all his own equipment, wouldn't have been able to do it. And yet, holding the card up to the light, he could count four strikes in the bull's-eye and one on the red. Franck was about to leave the stand without his prize when he saw, standing at his knee, a little girl on her own, fixing him with a stony look. Franck saw an indignant message in those huge still eyes, which left no doubt as to its meaning. He lifted the little girl up to face the stuffed animals hanging messily above the range. Without hesitating, she pointed at the biggest of all, a gorilla five times her size.

“You need eight hundred points for that one,” said the man, exasperated.

Franck lined up a few coins and totalled five hundred points with five bullets; the holes joined together in the bull's-eye like the petals of a single flower. Once again the gypsy studied the card with disbelief, and could only see three holes – where were the two others? The American had the devil's own luck, but that didn't mean he was going to get the show prize – it had certainly never happened before. Franck showed him how two bullets had been superimposed on the previous ones, you just had to look and show a bit of good faith to see that, the target proved it, what was the point of making a fuss? Passers-by were beginning to gather, and Franck couldn't understand why the stakes had suddenly risen. His mission and the need for discretion inhibited him slightly, but it was too late now to deprive the little girl of her trophy. He made sure she couldn't see what was happening, discreetly grabbed the stall-keeper's arm, twisted it behind his back, telling him to keep quiet, and stuck the muzzle of a rifle into his mouth. The man raised his arm in shocked surrender. A minute later the little girl grabbed her monkey in her arms, and at last gave in and smiled. Before letting her go, Franck could not resist running his hands through her long fine gold-speckled hair. Something told him she would never forget him.

Rosello was not the only one showing off his talents amongst the fairground attractions. Hector Sosa, known as Chi-Chi, the elder of the two Puerto Ricans, stopped in front of a punchball surrounded by a gang of young lads. Hector had always been capable of knocking out men three times larger than himself, and had made a speciality of charging head first towards the biggest and strongest, his bravery bordering on foolhardiness. He had become famous ten years previously, during the world middleweight championship in Santa Fe; employed as bodyguard to the reigning champion, Chi-Chi had reacted badly to a ticking-off, and put him out of any condition to fight. During his two months of detention behind bars in San Quentin, the toughest and cruellest prisoners had treated him with the greatest of respect. Now, by breaking the machine with one blow of his fist, he had become a hero to the youth of Cholong.

A few yards from there, Joey's older brother, Jerry Wine, ace driver, the one every gang wanted as a getaway driver for the big jobs, couldn't resist a turn on the dodgems, and was having a whale of a time. The object was to crash into as many people as possible, bing, bang, smashing into every obstacle, charging head down into the traffic jams, sparing nobody. What could be more fun for a guy who was capable of finding an escape route through the middle of a group of ten police cars, or of driving through a parking lot at forty miles per hour without touching a single lamp post? He spotted a group of trouble-makers who seemed a little annoyed by his driving, and decided to annoy them further with his little red car.

Guy Barber – real name Guido Barbagallo – for his part was glued to the lottery stand, where he was driving the operator mad by using several number combinations he had perfected in the Las Vegas casinos. The smallest event could trigger his passion for gambling, making him lose all sense of time and reality. Guy was an expert at inventing new ways of gambling, and would bet on anything, from numbers on banknotes to car licence plates or street posters. The most astonishing thing was that he always ended up by finding some logic in the most random sequences of numbers. At that level of obsession no one ever enquired whether this gift enabled his addiction or vice versa.

The only one, apart from Matt, who remained focused on the object of the mission, was Gregorio Sanfelice. Gregorio, a heavy-arms specialist, had been chosen by Don Mimino himself for his absolute trustworthiness. Greg was the exact opposite to a Manzoni, the opposite to a snitch – this was a man who had chosen to take five years in jail when the FBI were offering him his freedom in exchange for three or four names, in complete secrecy, without a trial, in such a way that nobody in the Mob would have suspected any treachery. While he waited for orders, leaning on a table in the drinks tent, he finished a carton of chips and a glass of beer. He wore a cap and was dressed entirely in blue denim. As he watched the local people coming and going around the surrounding stands, he thought only of the new man he would become once he got his two million dollars. Now that he was fifty, Greg felt it was about time to hang up his boots and return to the woman in his life, the mother of his children; he would swear to her that he would never risk death or prison again. He would make up for lost time, buy them a house near Bear Mountain, in the middle of the woods, and would spend the rest of his days reassuring them and taking care of them. They would never have anything more to fear. Once Manzoni had been sorted out, he would fly home with his colleagues, claim his money as soon as they had landed at JFK, and there and then, he would salute them, shake hands for the last time, and take a taxi to Zeke's at the corner of 52nd and 11th, where Michelle worked as a waitress. He would tell her to leave there and then, they would go and get the children out of school, and everything would begin again for them, somewhere far away. As he dreamed of this imminent future, he wiped a trace of foam off his big pistolero moustache, and took a last mouthful of beer. He rose from the table, and came face to face with a ghost.

Without showing any surprise, Greg lowered his cap over his face, left a few coins on the counter and went over to a row of game consoles. As he slid a coin into a pinball machine, he kept his eyes glued to the ghost, who was wearing an open-necked Hawaiian shirt over a white T-shirt and wandering around the fairground with his hands in his pockets. Greg didn't have to think very hard to remember him: that was the motherfucker who had almost sent him down for twenty years. The bastard, whose name was something like Di Morro or Di Cicco, had managed, ten years ago, to infiltrate a gang of robbers who were preparing a heist on a bank in Seattle. He had put on an incredibly effective performance and, in a feat almost unknown for an undercover agent, the fucker had succeeded in gaining Greg's trust through drinking sessions in the company of friendly nightclub hostesses; they had almost become friends. But Di Cicco had turned out to be a better actor than cop; he had successfully passed himself off as a gangster amongst real gangsters, but he had blown the operation through lack of coordination with his colleagues, and Greg had escaped by the skin of his teeth. Di Cicco's presence in this backwater was proof that Manzoni was there too. Greg, keeping an eye on the FBI agent, made a sign to Franck Rosello to warn Matt, who in turn felt a surge of adrenalin at this news. And then a sort of ballet began to take place around Di Cicco and Caputo, without either of them being aware of anything untoward.

While Jerry drove the minibus into the centre of town, Greg and Chi-Chi waited for the precise moment when the two agents would leave the Place de la Libération. Matt wanted to avoid unnecessary risks, and preferred to neutralize them immediately so he could work them over. Caputo, who was walking behind his partner, had a sudden premonition of trouble as they turned the corner of the Rue du Pont Fort. He couldn't have described what it was that had entered his mind, which was numbed by the fairground music, the beer and the sunshine. When this sort of thing happened, he simply handed himself over to his instinct for survival, something he called upon more often than others did. It was an instinct that had been honed by the ever present fear of death, in particular the fear of a stupid and pointless death, brought about by carelessness. To die fighting was one thing, but to die in an ambush was to die a rat's death, with no glory. However, with or without the premonition, there was no time to warn Richard or to reach for his gun: they both found themselves with a gun stuck in the back of the neck, and they raised their hands. Greg, pointing his at Di Cicco, was about to satisfy an unhoped-for personal vengeance. Chi-Chi searched Caputo, relieved him of his gun and silenced him with a blow on the back of the neck from his rifle butt. Matt, Guy and Franck joined them at the corner of the Allée des Madriers, and the minibus drove in silence through the empty streets of Cholong, bearing six members of the Cosa Nostra and two federal agents, who fully understood the purpose of the visit. Matt cocked his gun.