There were the same posters on the walls that she had seen in his Palermo room. Benny flushed. He told the women that the Signorina Parsons was English, that he had met her when she was attacked in the street, that he had promised to show her the antiquities of Palermo, but the photocopier had to be delivered.
'So she is a tourist in Corleone?'
'So she comes to see the wickedness of Corleone, and perhaps to send a postcard?'
Charley rode the sneers. She turned away, defiant, and took her seat again. She heard their laughter from the room. Perhaps they teased Benny, for bringing a tourist. He was distant when he came out of the inner room and each of the women made a show of kissing him on the cheek, and she thought their politeness to her was a charade. Did he screw them? Did he screw anyone on that narrow little priest's bed? Did Axel Moen fuck anyone on any bed? She smiled, lied her simplicity with a smile.
Out in the street, innocent and simple, 'What do they do?'
'They have a newsletter to issue, but the photocopier is broken. They produce a newsletter for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Corleone.'
'Is it a big circulation?'
He matched her innocence and simplicity, but there was no lie. 'Very small, very few people, which is why we have such humble resources, a room and two women and a photocopier. In Corleone is the culture of the mafia, but you would not know that. It is the heart beat of the mafia – from Corleone to Palermo, from Palermo across the island, from the island to the mainland, from the mainland to Europe and over the ocean to America. It is why we speak of the octopus, with many tentacles, but the heart beat of the beast is here. The sindaco speaks against the mafia, the priest denounces the mafia from the church, but that is politics and religion, and they change nothing.'
'When will something change?'
He smiled, innocent and simple. 'I will know that something has changed when we need two, three photocopiers.'
'Tell me about Corleone. Show it to me.'
He looked at her. His eyes that squinted against the sun were grave, as if he feared that she mocked him. 'Forgive me – so that you can buy postcards and boast to your friends at home that you were in Corleone?'
'Please, walk me through the town?'
'Why?'
Axel bloody Moen would have kicked her arse, would have said that she lurched on the edge of disclosure, would have snarled that she was at the cliff face of complacency.
'It's just, what I've seen, a street and a market and a school and blocks of apartments and a barracks. I can't imagine what you are fighting against.'
'I think you would be bored.'
'I want to understand.'
They walked to the piazza. Old men watched them from under the bars' awnings and youths sat astride their motorcycles and eyed I hem from under the shade of palm trees.
The sun beat on Charley's. arms and on her shoulders.
'It is the town of Navarra and then of Liggio and then of Riina. and then of Provenzano. Now it is the town of Ruggerio. To you, I he stranger, it will appear like any other town. It is unique in Sicily because here no businessman pays the pizzo.
Literally that is the small bird's beak that pecks for a little food, but on the island the pizzo is the extortion of money for "protection". In the 1940s, after the liberation from Fascism, a good statistic for you to carry home to your friends, there were more murders here per head of Copulation than in any town or city in the world.'
Charley said quietly, 'You don't have to talk me short, Benny, like I'm only a tourist.'
At the start of the old town, where the streets darkened and narrowed and climbed to the left and fell to the right, Benny bought her a coffee and a warm roll with ham and goat's cheese. His voice was a murmur. 'I will tell you one story, and perhaps from the one •lory you will understand. It is not the story of Navarra, who was the doctor here, and the parents of a twelve-year-old boy who brought the hysterical child to him and told the doctor that the child had seen the killing of a man, and Navarra injected the child with a "sedative" that killed him, and then apologized for his mistake. It is not the story of Navarra. It is not the story of Liggio, who was a cattle thief before he developed the heroin trade of the mafia. And not the story of Riina, who ordered the killing of the bravest of the judges and drank champagne in celebration. Not the story of Provenzano, who is called the trattore here, the tractor, because of the brutality of his killings. It is not the story of Ruggerio. Come.'
She gulped the last of the roll. She wiped the crumbs from the front of her T-shirt.
She followed him out onto the street.
'You will hear, anywhere in Sicily, the stories of Navarra and Liggio and Riina and Provenzano, maybe you can hear the story of Ruggerio. You will not be told the story of Placido Rizzotto, but that is the story that will help you to understand.'
They walked down a narrow street, on cobbled stones. The balconies with wrought-iron railings pushed out from the walls above them, seeming to make a tunnel.
Watched by an old man, watched by children who stopped their football game, watched by a woman who paused to rest from the weight of her shopping bags. No sun on the narrow street.
'First he had been in the army, then he was with the partisans. Then he came back to Corleone, where his father was at a low level with the mafia. Placido Rizzotto returned here with opened eyes from the mainland. He became a trade-union organizer. The mafia detested the trade unions because they mobilized the contadini, worked against the mafia's domination of the poor. To the Church he was a communist. To the police he was a political agitator. Perhaps the mafia and the Church and the police were distracted, but Rizzotto was elected as mayor of Corleone. Do I bore you, Charley?'
They stopped. They were near to the church, a huge edifice, at the front, and a bell tolled, and black-dressed women hurried for the door but swivelled their heads as they went that they might better watch them. Ahead of them was a bank. A fat-bellied guard leaned against the door of the bank, and his finger rested loosely in his sagging belt that took the weight of his holster, and he watched them.
'Ten o'clock at night, a summer night. A friend calls for Placido Rizzotto at his father's home, invites him to come for a walk. All the men in the town are walking in the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi. He was betrayed by his friend. He strolled along the street, and one moment his friend was with him and the next moment his friend was gone… All of the men walking that evening on the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi saw Liggio approach Rizzotto, saw the gun put into Rizzotto's back.
All of the men, all of those who had voted for him and who had cheered his speeches, watched him led away as if he were a dog led to a ditch to be killed. Are you bored, Charley?'
The ravine was in front of them. Water tumbled from above them and fell, and the flow was broken by dark stones that had been smoothed over the centuries. Above the ravine was a fortress of decayed yellow stone built on the flat top of a straight-sided rock mass, dominating. They were alone now with the ravine and the fortress, and the watchers were behind them.
'The people went home. They emptied the streets and they locked their doors and they went to their beds. They had surrendered. And Rizzotto did not even threaten the mafia, or the Church, or the police, to all of them he was merely a nuisance. It was in 1948. Two years later his body was recovered by the fire brigade from here. His father could identify him from the clothes, and from his hair that had not been eaten by the rats. A man who had seen Rizzotto taken away said, "He was our hero and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was to pick up a single stone from the street, and we could have overwhelmed the man with the gun. We did not pick up a stone, we went home." It was in 1948 and the culture of fear is the same today. Does my story bore you, Charley, or do you better understand?'