Made in Sicily (english edition)

By Vittorio Schiraldi

Many years after the publication of Baciamo le mani (I Kiss Your Hands) and La mafia degli occhi blu (Blue-eyed Mafia), Vittorio Schiraldi returns to the theme of the twilight of a boss, in whom it is easy to recognize the figure of Bernardo Provenzano, considered to have been the “Boss of all bosses” in Sicily. Schiraldi portrays the capo in his human dimension, inside the hideout where the Boss has shut himself up for more than thirty years in a voluntary imprisonment, from which Provenzano, perhaps unconsciously, dreams of escaping. He suspects that his long survival has made him an inconvenience for the many people who would like to see him dead. This suspicion slowly mutates into the knowledge that he has paid too high a price for the power that others now want to wrest from him; a suspicion accompanied bu the certainty that he no longer has a future. Schiraldi recounts all this in a language touched with irony and wit, at times surreal – perhaps the most appropriate way of showing the contradictions of the mafia’s world and the world of a personage who has paradoxically outlived his time, while continuing to leave a mark on our own. The novel surges out of this background: constructed like a detective story, charged with rhythm and suspense; clearly illustrating the absurd tenacity of the Sicilian boss, whose behavior at times verges on the grotesque (not unlike The Sopranos), making him a survivor isolated in a criminal reality that is now in total transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vittorio Schiraldi
• Release date: Jul 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9788863691252

Book preview

Sicily

1

The dead man, as dead men go, was seriously dead. You don’t end up in a walnut box by mistake when somebody empties all the cartridges a Browning can hold into you; and don Ciccio Scalise had taken every one of them.

And so the dead man, now that he was in a condition that only required him to resemble himself, lay motionless, with folded arms, in a first class casket, embellished along its sides with bright gilt laurels. It was lined with velvet padding, like a jewel box, protecting the departed from noises that were never going to bother him again.

Do you like it? asked the funeral director, who has just been introduced to me as a person of respect.

Fine casket, I approved.

Not to boast, but we’ve always taken care of the Scalise family. And I have to say: nobody’s ever complained about our work.

Would they’d be in any condition to complain? I asked, but my irony was lost on the coffin salesman, who meanwhile had pulled out a handkerchief to polish a brass knob.

Our motto is comfort and speed. We’re always the first ones there, he confided.

It can’t always be easy for you to get there at the right moment, especially when these things tend to be, well…improvised.

That’s true. You need to have a nose for it. You have to have a feel for which way the wind’s blowing, where the next blow’s coming from….

I can see that, I said, and for the second time I had the sensation that any attempt at sarcasm was wasted on this audience.

Now a fly, seeking an impossible passage, had started teasing the dead man’s cotton-plugged nostrils. A bystander with the face of a killer made a grimace of disgust.

And to think that if a fly ever dared to come anywhere near don Ciccio ‘s nose, he used to…. He growled, leaving the sentence unfinished, heavy with resentment.

"See, once you’re dead, even the flies take advantage of you, ‘ commented another man who wore a similar assassin’s face, even though he’d been introduced to me as an onorevole; a member of Parliament.

He turned to me with an interrogative look, but I didn’t answer. I knew enough about Mafia funerals to realize that in certain circumstances it’s best not to take a position. However, I was also sure that, out of respect, at least, I had to offer some reaction, so I limited myself to sighing, with appropriate feeling, a painful Yeah….

I don’t like going to funerals. Especially when there’s the risk of getting entangled with certain persons, and then not being able to get away from them. Alive, preferably. But this time, I only happened to be there; purely by chance, and maybe at the worst moment.

During one week in Palermo, three old bosses had been killed, and it was the general opinion that this was the beginning of a new war; one that tasted like a vendetta carried out against the Corleonese families twenty years after they’d won supremacy.

They’d shot the first one while he was playing bocce at Sferracavallo; then they got the second one with a bomb in his toilet, just as he pulled the chain in what would be his last meaningful act. The third – the aforementioned don Ciccio Scalise, in fact – was brought down by a hit man disguised as a nurse, or maybe he really was a nurse, who had penetrated the urology section of the local hospital and discharged the Browning into don Ciccio’s belly while the old man was waiting for a prostate examination.

Nobody could say my reasons for being in this room were anything but accidental. Don Ciccio Scalise was Gioacchino’s maternal uncle, and Gioacchino (formerly Iachino and more recently Jacky) instead of showing me the boat he was supposed to be selling me (my real reason for coming to Palermo) asked me to come with him to offer homage to the departed, knowing that with that gesture I could also pay off an old debt.

Later we’d go and look at his Boston Whaler: 28 feet long and two 200 horsepower engines. He was going to sell it, but offered it to me first, in the light of a friendship that went back to our school days, even though in recent years – ever since I’d left Palermo -- we’d seen each other infrequently.

Nonetheless, I was sure we’d be able to agree on a price I could afford, so I was impatient; I couldn’t wait for us to make the deal. Jacky knew how much I liked his boat, and so, once he decided to get rid of it, he called me in Rome, even though he knew he could get a better price from somebody else. He had plenty of money; he didn’t need to get more. So that was all it took for me to fly to Palermo, a trip I’d been wanting to make anyway. But I had to give precedence to the dead uncle, trying to do my bit.

For at least ten minutes all I’d done was shake hands in this house that seemed inhabited only by men. Women were invisibly present as the distant sound of weeping; but that, along with the usual formal male embraces, was the routine I’d expected. As it was, I’d made the acquaintance of one president, who indeed looked like a man of the government; three or four onorevoli; and at least ten notable persons with whom I’d exchanged the ritual kisses, without a single name being proffered to accompany these gestures of unexpected affection. And then I was assigned to a post of honor near the coffin itself.

At first Jacky had introduced me in rather vague terms, as a friend from Rome, never mentioning the boat or why I was back in Sicily after so many years; but then, as introduction followed introduction, as I realized I was being brought into ever more select circles, I seemed to be being thrust into a different role. Suddenly I’d been sent from Rome, and then the last person who introduced me to a group from a higher level, dutifully installed just two meters from the bier, had equivocated slightly as he defined my role. Perhaps he wanted to heighten the respect that was being offered to the dead when he explained that I was there to represent our friends in Rome, thereby investing me with the powers of a kind of plenipotentiary envoy.

From that moment on, I could feel the looks that followed me being weighted with an ever greater respect, to the point that a few people felt the need to kiss my hands; which, given the atmosphere, really didn’t bother me. On the contrary, it tickled my vanity unexpectedly. I was starting to enjoy it.

Not bad, in fact, for a writer of crime paperbacks who had to turn out at least three a year under the name of E.G. Lorraine: the pseudonym I was keeping alive until I could write the big book, the one that would finally let me sign my own name to it, the name that nobody knew yet.

I liked being catapulted into a story where, for a few hours, I was a protagonist in a story that other people seemed to be writing about me.

After so many years I found myself again speaking a language I’d forgotten, one that I’d only allowed some of my fictional characters to speak. Simultaneously, suddenly memories of past events were flooding back to me; experiences and encounters from my adolescence; things that I’d thought buried here in the city where I’d grown up.

I’d always known that many of my friends, first at school and then later at the university, were somehow linked to mafia families, but that had never bothered me. After all, I owed my own long ago entrance into journalism to an exclusive interview that Jacky had arranged for me with his uncle don Ciccio Scalise. At that time, he was the unopposed head of one of the most powerful mafia families on the island. And so, my presence at that funeral couldn’t be passed off as a mere pilgrimage, now that the incoming tide of life had cast me up on those same shores, bestowing on me, if only for a day, a seat in the gallery. Without any apparent curiosity, like someone who belonged in that house, I went on observing the men who filed past the bier, and I basked in the respectful glances they gave me, making me feel like a boss.

Tell me the truth, said Jacky. How do you like all this?

A lot, I admitted. Unfortunately, when you fall in love with the idea of something, the way so many Sicilians do when they think of the mafia, or about the way it used to, they forget how much it’s changed, what it’s become now….

That’s true, but it’s just as true that you could be born in Palermo or in Vancouver, but it still feels great to be treated like a boss, otherwise they wouldn’t spend their whole lives fighting to become one, independently of whatever kind of work they do in the rest of life. And if somebody decides to be a boss, he’s going to do his best – just as dictators do – to be an absolute one; not only controlling other men’s lives, but interrupting them, too. As the Roman emperors did, if we really want to go back to some tradition of nobility. You’ve got to be brave enough to admit it. The rest is just bullshit.

And where are you? How far have you come along that path?

Somehow I knew what he was going to say, but all the same, I wanted to hear Jacky say it himself.

I’m running on another track, he said, but I’ve got a few special privileges, even if they’re not the absolute ones I was talking about….

So? What does that mean?

Let’s just say it’s nice to be able to dispose of a power for convincing or dissuading people that doesn’t depend on politics or diplomacy, or your own place in society; but something that’s able to overturn any kind of traditional values. Why? Because it feeds on fear: the fear of those who know that at any moment, whatever power they have is counterbalanced by another power that can kill them. A power that lets you respond to any wrong or carry out any vendetta without having to pay for it.

Not always, I said, glancing at the coffin.

True. Sometimes things turn ugly and you end up dead. But that’s still an accident on the road, something that belongs to the history of mankind. A thing that happened.

I thought he’d finished talking. I could agree with some of what Jacky said but, even though I was still fascinated by those ideas, I was starting to get bored at being in the presence of people who incarnated those same ideas. This always happens to me.

I asked Jacky how long we needed to prolong our homage to the deceased. He shoved me towards a smaller sitting room and replied in a Sybilline mode, We’ll stay as long as it takes.

Then he gave me a pair of dark glasses, whispering that if I was bored, I could take a nap; something I suspected a few of the other guests were already doing behind sunglasses like mine. They had already taken their places in the room next to the one where the dear departed lay, and had assumed a position of total immobility.

I’d been their only a few minutes, thinking about how much I should offer for the boat, when a guy with a scar on his forehead, one of the first to have kissed me, accosted me as if we were seated together in a church pew.

Some of these folks are worried, because they say the Liquidator is supposed to arrive here from Rome, he murmured in my ear, being careful not to look me in the face.

Hearing the Liquidator mentioned made me think of the actor Harvey Keitel in some role that must have been memorable, except that I couldn’t quite remember if that was his name in the movie, and anyw his function was rather to make cadavers disappear, rather than incrementing their numbers.

Since I had no precise response to offer my interlocutor, who seemed rather worried, I preferred to generalize, gaining time.

Oh, so that’s what they’re saying?

That’s what they say, said my pew mate.

He paused, and then said insistently:

Well then, you’re from Rome, what d’you say --are they right to be worried?

He gave me a few minutes to reflect, and then, choosing my words carefully I answered:

Anybody who’s worried is right to be worried, because that means they’ve understood how things are. And the ones who aren’t worried – that means they’ve got no reason to worry, because they understand how things are, too.

Pretty stupid, but at least I’d used the right tone, and I was sure it had had its effect. In fact, the man with the scar went back to his corner, nursing his worries, and didn’t say another word.

I wondered if don Alfonso, the capo dei capi – boss of bosses – who’d been on the lam for thirty years might show up. I wouldn’t have been surprised if in the next little while he appeared at don Scalise’s coffin to render homage to his dead colleague. I asked myself if anyone would be able to recognize him, since the rumor was that he’s had plastic surgery that changed the way he looked.

He might even be here already, mingling with the others, even though that did seem improbable. A clandestine appearance wasn’t his style, nor could it be considered an authentic homage to the departed.

Do you think the Person will show up? I asked Jacky as soon as he came within range.

Jacky smiled. You’re starting to talk like one of them.

So what do you say?

I’d say that might be difficult.

Why? Wasn’t this death important enough for him?

Sure it was important, but there are some things more important than death. And one of them is being free, said Jacky. He paused, and then added, "Let’s go back in there. Mike’s here. He’s talking with the widow, but he wants to say hello

Mike Alioto was the nephew of Lucky Luciano’s enforcer; the guy who collected his payoffs, with all that that involved: making the rounds to collect the pizzo, shoving a gun in the face of customers who were reluctant to pay.

Right after the end of World War II, Mike’s uncle was extradited back to Italy, and just to keep in touch, or maybe because he could see that business was going to boom, he opened a funeral parlor in Palermo. It quickly made a name for itself, since he was still connected; and, like the Scalise family’s undertaker, always managed to show up at the bereaved household at the right time. Not too quickly, however: it would be awkward to find his client still alive.

Meanwhile, Mike grew up in Los Angeles. Ever since his mother abandoned him to run off with a guy who played in a band in Atlantic City, Mike had been living with his father, who earned a living cleaning swimming pools in Beverly Hills.

In reality, the pool cleaning business was more than a job for Johnny Alioto; it was a stratagem for banging the sexy wives ensconced in those luxurious houses and getting to hang out with Hollywood royalty. Johnny’s nickname was Firebird, since he’d gained a certain fame for the heavy equipment that all but blazed out of his pants.

But Johnny’s dreams of stardom had drowned along with him. One morning they found him face down at the bottom of a pool he hadn’t quite finished cleaning. The pose evoked William Holden in Sunset Boulevard.

Obviously someone had decided the only way to quench Johnny’s fiery bird for good was to keep it submerged for a long time in a swimming pool. However, the inquest concluded that the poor fellow had fallen victim to a sudden malaise, one that had struck him while he was performing his aqueous task in solitude. The Beverly Hills police pointed out that no one could have come to the unfortunate Johnny’s aid, given that at the moment of the accident, the owners of the villa were playing golf at their club.

Johnny Alioto was buried without too many regrets, and little Mike followed his grieving uncle back to Italy.

But before Johnny died, he must have had time to transfer his movie ambitions to his son. And so as soon as Mike finished school, he left Palermo and went to the Experimental Film Center in Rome to learn to be a director. After that, he spent a year in Los Angeles, where one of his father’s friends let him hang out at MGM in Culver City.

Back in Italy, with a little book full of phone numbers and addresses he’d scraped together in Hollywood, Mike settled for working as an assistant director while he waited for his personal debut. And since he knew English and had the right connections, for the past few months he’d been working for the great Francis Capone who was directing a movie in Sicily, naturally inspired by the mafia.

Mike had told me about it himself when I called him just before leaving for Palermo, so for the moment we didn’t have a lot to say to each other. But I knew it was my duty to offer condolences to don Ciccio’s widow. I wondered why Filippo Scalise, don Ciccio’s only son, wasn’t among the mourners.

Teresa Scalise was still talking with Mike Alioto. She didn’t seem at all like the typical sorrowing widow. I came up to her, gave Mike a faint smile and a pat on the back; and then at once I bowed to Teresa Scalise, who in turn inclined her head slightly.

Three years earlier she’d been mistakenly kidnapped by a group of thugs who thought they’d kidnapped the wife of a mere builder. These morons demanded a ransom of two million euros, but as soon as they realized their mistake, they also realized they’d never get that money. Trying to make amends, they carefully returned the capo’s wife to her home, but that gesture didn’t help much. A week later, in viale Lazio, a hundred meters from don Ciccio Scalise’s house, seven large plastic trash bags were found, each one containing a cadaver. Everyone understood that these accounted for the entire band of losers, now transmuted into garbage.

All the same, the incident had alarmed don Ciccio, because a mistake like that, even if it was the work of a group of amateurs, was the incontrovertible sign of a dangerous evolution of the times; a change that he would have to confront sooner or later. It worried him, and awoke dark forebodings that would never be dissolved.

Aunt, let me introduce my friend who’s visiting from Rome, said Jacky.

The widow nodded.

My sincere condolences, I murmured.

"What can you do?