‘What have we got to lose? We’re fucked anyway.’
‘So are they, Nicolo.’
‘Yes, but we know it and they don’t. We’re on the way out anyway, so let’s go with a bang!’
One of the two men on the other side of the table struck the wooden surface with his fist. He had a muddled, crunched face, the features too closely grouped for its overall size.
‘Who says we’re on the way out?’ he shouted.
The fourth man, who sported an extraordinary white moustache and matching sideburns on his bronzed face, laid a hand on the speaker’s arm.
‘We all do, Calogero,’ he said.
‘I don’t say any such thing!’ was the furious response.
‘Yes, you do. You say it by your anger, by your violent gestures, by your shrill tone of voice. The only people who squander their time and energy like that are people who know that they’ve lost. And we have lost. We had our moment of mastery, but now it’s over. And the only way we can retain some measure of respect is to recognize that fact.’
There was a silence, broken by a slight metallic click.
‘I have a message from Binu.’
All four men turned to the person seated at the head of the table. She was a dumpy, crumpled figure in a shapeless black dress who had been knitting throughout the preceding discussion. Now she set down her needles. Despite her age, sex and appearance, she had the undivided and respectful attention of every man present.
‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’ asked the one called Calogero.
‘He told me not to. He said that he wanted to hear what each of you had to say He said it would reveal a lot about you.’
Each of the men lowered his eyes, trying desperately to remember just what he had said. One thing was certain: the woman would know. She could recall, word for word, what such-and-such or so-and-so had said under torture in the long hours before they were strangled in the house of horrors which the Corleone clan had owned in Palermo, back at the height of their glory Later, she would tell her husband what she had heard, and he would give the appropriate instructions.
‘And what did Binu say?’ the man called Nicolo dared to ask.
‘He said, “Cui bono?”’
The men looked at each other in an apprehensive silence.
‘What dialect is that?’ one of them asked.
‘It’s called Latin,’ the woman went on, picking up her needles again. ‘It means, “Who stands to benefit?”’
There came a nervous guffaw.
‘I didn’t know Binu spoke Latin.’
‘He has a lot of time on his hands,’ the woman said to no one in particular. ‘He’s been reading. And thinking.’
‘Who stands to benefit from what?’ asked Nicolo.
The woman looked at him.
‘From taking our men and leaving them to die in the back of a refrigerated truck after hacking Lillo’s leg off with a chain-saw.’
‘That bastard Limina, of course!’
‘And what did he benefit?’
‘Revenge for his son’s death!’
The woman set her knitting needles down again with the same faint click.
‘But we didn’t kill Tonino Limina.’
‘Of course not. But they think we did.’
The woman reached into some invisible crevice in her garments. A sheet of paper appeared, which she scanned.
‘Bravi!’ she remarked with sullen irony. ‘So far you’ve said all the things that Binu said you would say. Now, here’s his question to you. Who did kill Tonino Limina?’
‘Our rivals in Palermo,’ the white-moustached man replied promptly. ‘The competition there is out to get us for things we’ve done in the past, and the easiest way is to set us up against the Limina family.’
‘Or maybe it’s one of the new enterprises,’ Calogero put in. ‘That nest of snakes in Ragusa for example. The result’s the same. We and the Catanesi exhaust ourselves in a continuing blood feud, and the third party takes advantage.’
‘Or the Third Level,’ the woman said quietly.
A long silence, broken only by the drumming fingers of the man with the restless hands.
‘Them?’ whispered Calogero at length. ‘But they’re finished. They don’t respond any more.’
‘Not to us, no. Because we’re finished, too.’
‘Who says so?’ was the aggressive response.
The woman pointed to the sheet of paper covered in fine, spidery writing.
‘He does. We’ve always been realists, he says. That’s been our strength. And the reality now is that we don’t count any more, except perhaps to be made use of.’
She’s talking like a man, the others all thought. They listened to her words as though to an oracular utterance by a sibyl, because they knew they must be true. Nothing but a knowledge of the truth, communicated through his mouthpiece by her fugitive husband, could have given this dumpy grandmother the absolute male authority she wielded as of right. As though to compensate, the men all started to chatter like women.
‘Maybe they did it themselves.’
‘Murdered their own child?’
‘Of course not! Someone else, of no account, but rigged to look as if it was Tonino.’
‘But through their lawyer they told that magistrate, the one who was just killed, that it wasn’t him.’
‘Since when does anyone tell judges the truth?’
‘Or lawyers, for that matter.’
‘But if it wasn’t Tonino, why did they hit back at us?’
‘Any excuse is good. We’ve seen it before on this island. East versus west. And we know the Messina crowd were in on this.’
‘Who cares why? Kill them all! Let God sort them out.’
‘Who else could have gone after that judge? No one else would dare to try an operation like that in their territory. Besides, no one else was interested. It was the Limina case she was investigating.’
‘I heard that she’d been pulled off that one.’
‘Officially?’
A cynical laugh.
‘Enough of this bullshit!’ shouted Calogero at last. ‘The simple fact is that they have killed five of our men, and if we want to maintain any respect at all, we’re going to have to get even.’
‘Right!’
‘OK!’
‘Let’s do it!’
‘And slowly, if possible. A bomb is too good for them!’
‘Perhaps we should have a word with those blacks that Ignazio was trading on the side before he fell down that mine-shaft. Someone told me that in Somalia they still use crucifixion as a form of execution. Maybe one of them knows how to do it.’
‘We should nail up Don Gaspa and that Rosario side by side.’
‘With a sign reading, “But where’s Christ?”’
All four men burst into laughter. The woman’s voice cut through the companionable male mirth.
‘Who do you mean by them?’
‘The Liminas, of course!’ the elderly man replied, still intoxicated by the wave of testosterone-laden empathy, like back in the old days before all the men of the family had been killed or locked up in cold, remote prisons or forced into concealment in a series of ‘safe houses’, leaving this hag to run the clan by proxy.
