The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia Read Online Free PDF Page A

being arrested, I was the only one who was spared the investigations. And I said to myself: my godfather’s forgotten about me .
    For the blink of an eye, I had the impression that Fava’s face had been set in motion: his eyelids were flickering, his cheeks trembling, and his freckles twitching. But then his cheeks turned pink and relaxed again, and he fell silent. The woven straw seat of the chair he was sitting on creaked. It was as if the straw were betraying his insecurity. For a long time there was no sound to be heard but the squeaking of the woven straw and the officer sitting by the door making a rustling sound as he turned the pages of his John Grisham novel. Some noise filtered up from the street, car doors slamming and the roar of a passing bus.
    The fact that his own godfather had become a turncoat hadn’t persuaded him, he said, to switch to the other side. There was still no need. Plainly his godfather had covered for him, in spite of the obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He had simply hushed up the fact that Marcello Fava had belonged to Cosa Nostra since he was twenty years old. So why should Fava have crossed over to the other side? There was no need to. No feelings of guilt. He only experienced those later on, toward his wife. For twenty years he had cheated on her with the Mafia. His wife had never known anything, he said, she had never doubted him for a moment. If I say a horse is flying, my wife will believe it.
    But she wasn’t as naive as her husband imagined. No Sicilian woman is naive. She walked to police headquarters when she heard that her husband had been arrested again. She knew that he hadn’t been a victim of the judiciary, innocently persecuted on suspicion of being a thief and a bank robber, but someone who had had the end of his prison sentence sweetened by his bosses when they had paid for the baptisms of his two sons—four hundred guests, very Cosa Nostra. Lobsters and champagne. She knew that when he went with her to mass on Sunday he was only waiting for a sign from his boss. A slight nod of the head, and already he was getting up from his pew to discuss a few matters outside—protection money, money from public contracts, bribes, new supermarkets and bingo halls for money laundering, money for mafiosi in jail. The clan’s money was never enough. After communion he sat back down in his seat. She knew he ignored her when she said: “I don’t like those people you talk to.” She said nothing more than that. She knew what it meant when he begged her to go with him to lunch atthe boss’s villa. To a christening in Palermo cathedral. To a wedding feast in Mondello, in the Palace Hotel, with real swans swimming in the pool. It would have been a deadly insult to appear without his wife.
    His wife’s dislike of Cosa Nostra didn’t stop her from following him in his flight from the police. A life that Cosa Nostra made as pleasant for him as possible. His brother found him a little villa outside Palermo and a few lads to act as bodyguards, who checked that the coast was clear, who went with him on his motorbike, because that’s the easiest way for a wanted mafioso to get around Palermo. The full-face helmet was his disguise, that and the wigs, the stick-on beards—which didn’t keep the “flunkeys,” as he still called the police in those days, from storming the villa. Shots rang out, and his wife thought he was injured. While she was looking for him in all the hospitals of Palermo, she didn’t know that they had just been warning shots and he was already in handcuffs at police headquarters. She was pregnant at the time. And lost the child. After a week in solitary, he decided to do the unthinkable. His wife said only: “Whatever you do, I’m with you.”
I have no daughters. That’s something I’d rather not talk about. It’s an open wound for me. Because when I was twenty, I was given a daughter. Who died at birth. I have three dead