When the landing of the block was quiet, as it would be for thirty minutes, the prisoner stood. It surprised him that his hands did not shake as he unbuckled his belt.
Holding his belt, he scrambled up onto the upper bunk. He could see now, through the squat window, through the bars, the panorama of Palermo. The window of the cell was open. A hard wind came on his face. Through the bars he could see the mountains above Palermo. In the mountains was the home of his mother, in the city was the home of his wife and his children. As he hooked the buckle of his belt around a bar at the window he heard only the howl of the wind.
His wife had told him that he was dead. The magistrate had told him he would die by the push, or by the knife thrust, or by poison.
He pulled the belt hard and tested that it was held strong by the bar.
Suicidio was a crime against the oath he had taken many years before. When a man took his own life he lost his dignity and his respect, and that was a crime against the oath.
The prisoner wound the end of the belt around his throat and knotted it. There was not an adequate drop from the top bunk bed, nor was the belt long enough, for him to break his neck when he slid his weight clear. He would strangle himself to death.
He had nothing more to tell the magistrate, nothing more to tell of Mario Ruggerio.
He mouthed a prayer, and he tried to find in his mind the faces of his children.
He was suspended, kicking, choking, writhing, and below the cell window men walked the monotonous circles of exercise.
'So this is home?'
'This is Cinisi, and it is my home.'
'Quite a nice-looking little place, a lot of character,' Charley said brightly.
She looked up the main street, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. At the end of the street was a granite mountain face, and above the rim of the mountain there was a clear azure sky in which cloud puffs raced in the wind. Against the grey rock face, dominating the street below, was the church that had been built with sharp and angular lines.
'My father, before they killed him, called Cinisi a mafiopoli,' Benny said.
He held the door of his car open for her. She thought it a nicelooking place, and the character was in the smart terraces of houses that flanked the main street. The windows of most of the houses were masked with shutters, but there were potted plants on the balconies and the paint was fresh on the houses' walls, white and ochre, and the main street was swept clean in front of the houses. Set in the paving between the houses and the street were flowering cherry trees, and under the trees was a scattering of pink blossom.
'I can't see anything, Benny, can't feel it. Maybe I could not see much in Corleone, maybe I could feel something in Prizzi, but not here. There doesn't seem to be anything to touch.'
'Look to the mountain,' Benny said.
Charley wore her best skirt, which she had bought with Peppino's money, and her best blouse. She stood with the sun and the wind on her thighs and shins. The force of the wind tunnelled down the main street. She stood boldly with her feet a little apart, as if to brace herself. There was scrub on the lower slope of the mountain, where the fall was less severe, but higher on the rock wall nothing grew. The mountain was a harsh presence above the main street.
'It's a mountain, it's rock, it's useless.'
He touched her arm, a small gesture as if to direct her attention, and there was a softness in his voice. 'You are wrong, Charley. Of course you are wrong, because you do not live here, you do not know. They own the mountain, they own the rock, they own the quarries. Did you not come on the plane to Palermo?'
'Came by train,' Charley said. Axel Moen had told her that the vulnerable time for an agent was the sea change between overt and covert, the journey from safety to danger, told her it was good to take time on the journey to reflect on the sea change. Charley lied. 'I thought it was wonderful to come by train, sort of romantic, on a train through the night and crossing a continent.'
'Because they own the mountain and the rock and the quarries, they wanted the airport for Palermo built here. The runways are two kilometres from here. There is too much wind and the mountain is too close, but that was not important because they owned the mountain, the rock, the quarry. Cinisi was a place of farms and vines and olive trees, but they turned the contadini off their land, and the stone made the base for the runways, the stone could be a base for the concrete, and they came to own the airport. They own everything that you see, Charley, every person.'
They were outside a smart house. There were recently fitted hardwood surrounds to the windows and a heavy hardwood door with a polished brass knocker.
'Is your mother inside?'
'Yes.'
She said with mischief, 'And waiting for your washing?'
'Yes.'
'Can she wait a little longer for your washing?'
'Of course – what do you want?'
'I want to see where they killed your father, where you were in the car when they killed him.'
Perhaps she had startled him. His lips narrowed and his eyes glinted and his cheeks were taut. He walked away from her. She followed him. Benny went past small groups of old men who stood in the sun and let the wind grab at their jackets, and they did not meet his eyes, and he did not look at them. A woman with shopping stopped as he came close to her, and then in ostentation she turned her back on him to stare into the window of an alimentari. As he went by them, three boys who gossiped and sat astride their scooters revved their engines so that the black exhaust fumes carpeted his face. Charley followed. He stopped, as if challenging her, pointed to a gelateria, every sort of ice-cream, every flavour, and she shook her head. At the top of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele was the piazza of Cinisi. A priest came from the church and saw Benny and looked away and hurried on, his robe driven by the wind against the width of his hips.
There were more men in the piazza, more boys idle and squatting on their motorcycles.
She was making him live the moment again, and she wondered if he hated her. He talked her through the chronology of a death, as if he were a tourist guide in the duomo or at the Quattro Canti or at the Palazzo Sclafani. He pointed to the street beside the church.
'It was done there. I had been late at the school for instruction in the violin. My father had collected me on his way back from I errasini. He came for me because it was raining, and they would have known which afternoon I stayed at the school for music, and they would have known that if it were raining he would collect me. It was not important to them that I was in the car, that I was ten years old. That afternoon it was convenient for them to kill my father…'
There was a bar on the corner of the piazza. The wind gusted the wrapping of a cigarette packet past the closed door to the bar. It had been seventeen, eighteen years before – of course, there was nothing to see. A narrow street leading into a pretty piazza under the shadow of the church of San Silvestro, a killing zone.
'What had he done? What had your father done?' She knew that she would take him to bed, that day or that night.
'He told the contadini that they should not give up their land. He said that they would be robbed if they agreed to sell their land. He said that they were farmers and they should continue to harvest the olives and the oranges and to grow maize. He said that if they sold their land and the airport was built, they would never work again because the jobs made by the airport would go to people from Palermo, who were not contadini. He said to the people that the success of the airport would be a triumph for the mafiosi, and a disaster for the contadini. He was only a shopkeeper, but he was an honest man, his honesty was respected. There was a time when people began to listen to him. My father called a meeting of all the people in the town and the peasants who had the olives and the oranges and the maize. The meeting was to be here, where we stand. My father was going to tell the people that they should oppose the building of the airport. The meeting was for that evening.'
'So they killed him, to silence him.' She would lie with him on a bed, that day or that night.
'Because he obstructed them, and because he made fun of them. The night before, I had heard my father in the bedroom practise the speech he would make. He had many jokes to tell about them. The family in Cinisi at that time, destroyed now, replaced, was the family of Badalamenti. He spoke of the 'Corso Badalamenti' where they
