"And Max? He's better?"
"A little. It'll take time, though."
"Ah, Cristoforo, if only I didn't ask the two of you to come get a drink with me, to walk with me to the station. If only—"
"Forget it, Ugo; it's not your fault. They were after Max. If they didn't get him then, they would've gotten him some other time."
On the other hand, some other time I might not have been with him to absorb a great deal of gratuitous punishment. But this I dismissed as an unworthy thought. I clapped Ugo on the back. "I'm glad to see you," I said honestly.
"And I you. Look, here's Maria."
"Chris, hello!" Ugo's wife called in English, and I received an embrace as openhearted if not quite as suffocating as Ugo's. "You poor man!"
An animated, wiry woman a year or two older than Ugo, Mary Massey had been an accountant employed by the Americans at the Sigonella Air Force base when she'd met him at a St. Agatha's Day party in Catania. A few months later they were married, Mary for the first time, the widowed Ugo for the second.
It was a relationship of opposites: Mary's father was an American master sergeant from Pennsylvania, her mother an Italian bookkeeper from Messina, up the coast from Catania. Mary had spent eleven years in Philadelphia. Well read, well traveled, she had two college degrees (one American, one Italian), an inquisitive, intelligent mind, and a sometimes biting sense of humor. Ugo, as blunt as a watermelon, had left school in the fourth grade; had never been north of Naples or had the least desire to do so until Mary began dragging him off on yearly vacations; and still possessed, as far as I could tell, a world view better suited to the simple olive-grower he once was than to the business titan and international art collector he'd become.
The marriage shouldn't have lasted a year, but somehow they had clicked. Ugo, with plenty of native intelligence and his own rough charm, tolerated and actually seemed to enjoy Mary's barbed wit, and Mary was equally broad-minded about Ugo's Neanderthal opinions. When they didn't agree, which was all the time, they laughed and went on to the next subject. It had worked for them for six years, and from the look of them as we walked to the parking area—Ugo's hefty arm tenderly encircling Mary's fragile shoulders, Mary leaning into him—they were still going strong.
The airport was on the Plain of Catania, some distance south of the city. For the first few miles Ugo drove through a string of small villages and decaying stone farmhouses overlooking rocky land that would have seemed untillable if not for the evidence of scraggly rows of grapevines or stunted olive trees. The dark, small people with their creased faces; the hard land; the unadorned, whitewashed buildings made it seem like another world from Bologna. If not for the occasional caffè and tabaccheria signs in the villages, I would have thought we were in the Greek islands.
It was a sunny day, the first after two days of rain, and there were knots of women sitting outside to gossip and enjoy the warmth. Fashions hadn't changed much down here. Most of them wore the same black dresses and black shawls that I'd seen in photographs from their grandmothers' generation. And all but a few of them had their chairs turned away from the street so that they faced the blank white walls of the buildings a few feet behind them. It seemed odd to me, and I commented on it.
Ugo laughed. "You don't find that in Catania or Palermo. These villages—they're centuries behind. The women keep their eyes away from the streets, the cars, so that they don't catch the eye of a man even accidentally. Quaint, don't you think?"
"Oppressive, don't you think?" Mary said in English, then translated for Ugo's benefit.
He shrugged. "The old ways. There's a lot to be said for them. At least the women didn't talk back." With another rumbling laugh he reached across and squeezed Mary's knee.
The open country gradually gave way to the sprawling southern reaches of Catania. Ugo went screeching through the twisting, narrow streets at the death-defying speed with which everyone down here seemed to drive, even in the city. It seemed a dreary place, with long rows of dark, low tenements and a lot of garbage in the streets. Many of the buildings were made of a repellent muddy-purple stone. These, I knew from my Michelin, were built from the lava with which Mt. Etna sporadically engulfed the city. Several times on the drive I had seen the conical volcano looming to the north, an elongated pancake of steam trailing from its peak.
Twice I watched in surprise as small, three-wheeled automobiles were pushed over the sidewalk and through what appeared to be the double front doors of ground-floor apartments. Another time I saw one of the cars through a window, standing in the middle of what was unmistakably the kitchen. A few feet away an aproned woman was chopping vegetables at the sink.
When I remarked on this, Ugo shrugged again, but didn't smile this time. "Eh, it's an old city. The apartment buildings don't have garages."
"Why not leave the cars out on the street?"
Ugo grumbled something unintelligible, and pressed the accelerator even farther down. My question hadn't pleased him.
"You can't leave a car out all night in Catania," Mary said. "At least not around here. It's not such a great idea in our neighborhood, either. The car might still be there in the morning, but forget about hubcaps and mirrors. Ugo, do you remember what happened to Silvia?" She turned to look at me over her shoulder. "I have a cousin who parked one of those little cars in front of a restaurant and went in to eat. Five big men came along, picked it up, and simply ran off with it. She actually saw them do it, but she couldn't catch them."
Ugo pouted. "Any big city has a little crime. New York is worse." Down went his foot on the accelerator.
I resolved to ask no more questions about curious native customs.
There is no quick way through or around Catania. One must wind through the heart of the city to get to the other side. This we did, and after a while the dismal streets broadened into clean, pleasant avenues, and the neighborhoods took on an affluent sheen. We stopped for a few minutes near the Via Etnea, a posh commercial street that might have been in Rome or Paris, so I could buy some socks and underwear. The ones I'd started out with were being held in Bologna along with my duffel bag as material evidence. These purchases naturally required some explanation. Ugo and Mary were shocked, of course, and insisted on going over the same ground I'd covered with Antuono a few hours before. To equally little avail.
A few miles north of the city we finally pulled into a seaside neighborhood of handsome villas and small apartment buildings, and parked in an unpaved alley bordered on both sides by eight-foot stucco walls topped with broken glass.
"We'll leave the car here," Ugo said. "We're going out for dinner later. "
Half a dozen boys of nine or ten trotted up. Cigarettes dangled from several of the small mouths. Ugo gave one of the smokers, a hot-eyed kid wearing a torn Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, a 1,000-lire note.
"Protection money," Mary told me. "They watch the car. The Mafiosi begin early here."
Ugo scowled at her. "Very funny," he muttered. "See, I'm laughing. I'm going inside to get the pictures ready for Cristoforo."
He unlocked a tall, spiked gate in one of the walls and stalked down a path through a sparsely planted rock garden toward the house, a modern, boxlike three-story structure painted pale blue.
"Oh-oh, now I've made him mad," Mary said with no sign of repentance. "I'll have to be good for the rest of the day." As usual, when Ugo wasn't there, she spoke English to me.
She closed the gate behind us and shook it to make sure it was locked. As we followed a few yards behind Ugo a startlingly large bulldog gallumphed out from behind a corner of the house and made fearsomely for her, spittle drooling from its dewlaps and lovelight shining in its eyes.