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

children. They all died at birth. That’s something my wife is always reminding me about. Because they’re buried in Palermo. And my wife constantly thinks of them, of those dead children. I hope I’ll bring her back to me one day. So that I can do my duty at last .
    When he talked about his three dead children, his eyes welled up with tears. He looked awkwardly in his briefcase for ahandkerchief, bent down to hide his face, and blew his nose noisily into it. He saw the miscarriages as a curse from God. As a punishment for his blasphemous life. Perhaps he was thinking about the people who had wept like children before they were strangled. Perhaps he was thinking of the ones who had died standing up, which is what the men of Cosa Nostra call it when a man of honor doesn’t plead for his life. Perhaps he was thinking about how he had taken part in the funeral of a victim, about how he had straightened the sash on the wreath, looked the family in the eyes, and shaken their hands to express his sympathy. Perhaps. And perhaps not. Had he not acted like a soldier?
I was always very devout. As a child, I was an altar boy for the Salesians. After that, I drifted away from the church a little, I committed my first burglaries—but I’m still devout even today. As my son is, too. He loves religious processions. When we were still living in Sicily, he wouldn’t miss a procession. Sometimes he copied them at home, he wore a veil and a train like the saints in the procession. He has three hundred figures of the saints at home. He’s taken them all over the place. And he does that even now that he’s eighteen years old and has a girlfriend .
    At the end of the interview Fava got to his feet and cracked his knuckles. The police woke from their slumbers; one of them looked through the peephole and nodded to the other officers. He hoped his observations had been useful to me, Fava said sheepishly. He awkwardly put his crib sheet back in the briefcase. When he opened it I saw that it was empty, apart from a book, History of the Mafia from 1943 until the Present . I remembered an old bookseller in Palermo, whose shop wasn’t far fromthe Via della Libertà, telling me that the bosses from the Borgo Vecchio were among her best customers. As soon as she put a new book about the Mafia in her shop window, it sold out straightaway.
    “Is there anything about you in that book?” I asked. And Fava replied: “Yes, on page 568.” He said it like someone who’s managed to get an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica .
    Then he took his leave of me, very formally, with a small hint of a bow. He seemed relieved. He said: “There are people who go through life with their eyes open. And those who live with their eyes closed.” At last, four officers flanked him and walked him to the street. I had to wait upstairs in the apartment until the car he was in had disappeared.
    The two remaining policemen were curious to know whether I’d found the interview interesting. Whether I’d met other mafiosi, and what differences I’d spotted in their personalities. And what Germans know about the Mafia. Then they offered to take me in their car to the nearest taxi stand. Their car looked like a cross between a minibus and an amphibious vehicle, so I asked them if it could drive in water as well.
    “We can’t tell you that,” the policemen said, “because then we’d have to kill you.”
    The man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit also cracks his knuckles. We’re already preparing to land in Palermo, the tables are tipped up again, the seat-belt signs are on, and I’m still wondering whether I should speak to him for a moment. But what would I say? “Remember me? I’m a journalist and interviewed you once, in Rome.” Because I don’t think he does remember me. Journalists are never perceived as people. We’renothing but mirrors that people talk into. You speak into them, and in the end an article comes out. You remember the name of the