'A minute, darling, wait a minute. Mario, you can only learn to swim in the water, you can't learn on the beach with a football. OK, please yourself. Play football, don't learn to swim.'
The lie hit her. The lie was the destruction of the world of the little boy who wanted to play football, and the lie would be agony to the little girl who wanted to learn to swim. She took the watch from her wrist, slipped it in the bag. The watch was supposed to be waterproof. The watch was the lie.
'You play football, Mario. You don't want to learn to swim, then that's fine.'
There was the white ring on her wrist. It was as if she'd shed the lie. She walked with Francesca towards the sea. It was wonderful. She arched her back. The sun's warmth was on her shoulders and her stomach and her thighs. It was perfect.
He had been the day before, and the day before that, to see his consigliere. It was a good assumption that he would go again that day. Tano waited. It was a good assumption that the man from Catania would come again that afternoon, as the crisis isolated him, to try to confirm the support of his consigliere. The home of the consigliere was a large house, in half a hectare of ground that was enclosed by a wall topped with broken glass set in concrete and in a private cul-de-sac. Tano watched. Where he waited and watched he could not see the consigliere's home – he was on the public road, away from the turning into the cul-de-sac – but he could see with an uninterrupted view the parked car that had been taken the night before from a street in Acireale to the north, near the church of San
Pietro e Paolo. If the man from Catania came in his Mercedes, then he must drive past the parked car. Tano held the mobile telephone.
Tano was a careful man. He had been able to travel back across the Atlantic twelve years before because he was careful. When the net closed on his friends, colleagues, family, when the FBI sprang the trap in New Jersey, his name had not figured in the files collected around the Pizza Connection investigation. When the squadra mobile had mounted for the bastard Falcone the big arrest operation of the year after his return to the island, four hundred men, again his name was not included. It was natural, when it came to his offering his loyalty to one man, that he should have chosen Mario Ruggerio. Mario Ruggerio was the most careful man he had worked with. With the care came Tano's loyalty.
He believed himself to be the favourite of Mario Ruggerio, and he had begun to feel in the last months, that he might, one day, succeed Mario Ruggerio – not this year, not next year, not for many years, but one day… He thought he was the favourite because Mario Ruggerio had entrusted to him the preparation of the bomb, the planning for the bomb and the detonation of the bomb. When this bomb was exploded he would prepare and plan and detonate the second bomb, and his position as the favourite would be confirmed, not Carmine who had the brains of a wood plank, not Franco who he thought was stupid. His future was linked inexorably with the future of Mario Ruggerio. They climbed together, him a step lower on the ladder, but it was together.
He could not bear to imagine failure, slipping on the step on the ladder. Could not bear to consider the iced fury of Mario Ruggerio. But he could imagine, consider, the praise of Mario Ruggerio, the quiet, half-spoken praise that brought the thrilled flush through him. Tano would do anything, alcuna cosa, to win the praise of Mario Ruggerio, and think nothing of what he had done. Tano had lost no sleep, not a minute of rest in his bed, after he had slit the throat from ear to ear, drawn the sharpened knife through the windpipe, of a street thief.
He saw the Mercedes.
His fist tightened its hold on his mobile telephone, his finger hovered over the button of the final digit of the number built into the telephone pager. The telephone pager was integral to the bomb of dynamite packed inside a wall of ballbearings.
He had held the scrawny legs of the man from Agrigento while Mario Ruggerio had grunted and perspired through the process of strangulation. They climbed the ladder together, and higher. He pressed the button of the final digit… The flash of light. The hammer-crash of the explosion. The Mercedes picked up and tossed across the road, the impact collapsing the wall that the body of the Mercedes hit. The blue-grey of smoke, the flicker of the fire… They were at the top of the ladder.
He saw, in his mind, the pleased smile of Mario Ruggerio, and he seemed to feel the hand of Mario Ruggerio cudgel his shoulder in praise. He was the favourite…
The fire ripped through the body of the Mercedes.
Tano walked away.
The journalist from Berlin settled in his seat as the aircraft banked over the sea and then straightened on its course. Looking left from his window seat he could see the urban sprawl of Catania, and looking right he could see the coastline and the mountains of the toe and foot and ankle of the mainland. He reached down and took his laptop from the bag beneath his feet. He was an unhappy flier and felt more comfortable when he worked during a flight, his attention distracted from the syndromes of vertigo and claustrophobia, and it was easy to work with the laptop in the Business Class compartment that his contract guaranteed him. He was not a vain man, but it was part and parcel of his trade that the cover of the laptop should be festooned with the adhesive stickers of airlines he had flown with and cities from which he had reported.
The laptop boasted of visits to Beirut and Dhahran and Hanoi and Belfast and Grozny and Sarajevo and Kabul. He started, two fingers, to type, and he was going well and his mind was diverted from t he warm air turbulence until the passenger beside him spoke.
'I see you are a journalist, a journalist from Germany, and you have been in Sicily to write about the malvagita of our society – did you find that wickedness? It is a strange time for you to be leaving, it is peculiar that you should choose this day to leave.
Myself, I am a physician, I work with children, I do not see any foreign journalists, they do not come to my surgery. I presume you have been meeting with our illustrious politicians and with our social workers and with magistrates. Are you confused? I met once with a British engineer working on a sewerage project here. The engineer said that he believed the evil in our society to be a product of imagination, a subject of discussion in the same way that the British are obsessed with discussion of the future of the weather. He told me also that in his part of Britain there was a great inland sea in which there was said to live a huge monster, a creature from pre-history, which was elusive whenever scientific examination was made of the inland sea. But the engineer said that many people desired to believe in the existence of the monster even if there was no proof that it lived. I remember, it was the monster of Loch Ness. The engineer said it did not exist in reality, and he said, his opinion, that La Cosa Nostra was similar, something that is in our imagination. If you are leaving Sicily today, then you must surely follow the belief of the British engineer. I said to him, but of course he did not have the time, that he should come with me to the rotten apartment towers of Brancaccio in Palermo, where I work. He should see the children without hope who live under the heel of La Cosa Nostra, who eat when La Cosa Nostra says they should eat, whose parents work when La Cosa Nostra says they should work. And I said that he should go to Rome and Milan and taste the corruption in government and commerce that is brought by La Cosa Nostra. And he should go, I told him, to Frankfurt and London and New York and walk among the addicts of Grade A drugs and think further about La Cosa Nostra. But he said that I made a fantasy, that I saw a monster like the one in the inland sea. You leave now? It was on the car radio just before I reached the airport, a killing in Catania, a bomb. I am surprised that you are leaving at a time when there is proof of wickedness. I am sorry that I interrupt you from your important thoughts. Excuse me, forgive me…'