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

newspaper or magazine. Or maybe not. In Italy, at any rate, I’m rarely remembered. And he would have good reason not to remember me, because in returning secretly to Palermo he is putting his new life on the line. His freedom, his status as a collaborator with the forces of law and order, his livelihood, the protection of his family, everything. When a turncoat mafioso returns secretly to Sicily, it doesn’t augur well. In Sicily everyone remembers the career of Baldassare Di Maggio—mafioso, hit man, and driver to the boss Totò Riina. As a key witness in the Andreotti trial, Di Maggio had been responsible, among other things, for describing the kiss on the cheek between Andreotti and Totò Riina—one of the more spectacular statements about the close relationship between the politician and the Mafia boss. Later Di Maggio had returned to Sicily where, in his hometown of San Giuseppe Jato, he would commit a murder—one that had nothing to do with the Andreotti trial but was a settling of old scores.
    When Di Maggio was arrested for that murder, he provided the excuse that was needed to bring about the collapse of the Andreotti trial. The defense wanted above all to prove that the key witnesses whose statements incriminated Andreotti were not credible. If the witness to the kiss on the cheek was not in fact the turncoat mafioso he claimed to be, but a mafioso who was still committing crimes, even though he was in the witness protection program, then it would be a major error even to listen to his testimony against one of the most important Italian statesmen, let alone take it seriously as incriminating evidence.
    Di Maggio was arrested and thrown out of the witness protection program. But even then he didn’t deviate from his account of the kiss on the cheek between Totò Riina and Giulio Andreotti.
    Below us, the sea glistens as smooth and viscous as pitch. The plane is already flying at a low altitude, and I see the Isola delle Femmine floating in the pitch. The sky is bright with stars, and the mountain, the one I always think we’re going to crash into every time I fly into Palermo, stands out in the moonlight. But before fear can really take hold of me, the plane has already landed.
    As always in Italy, the passengers are getting up and impatiently clearing out the luggage compartments while the plane is still rolling along the runway. When the engines are turned off, everyone crams into the narrow aisle, the two old Sicilians try to push their way to the front with their plastic bags and parcels, the man in the pinstripe suit sticks his unlit cigarillo in his mouth, and the woman with the stockings straightens her skirt. When the plane door opens, damp, warm air pours in, smelling of Africa.
    We walk across the runway to the airport building; in the pale glow of the floodlights I see the man who was sitting next to me. I watch him furtively as we wait for our bags beside the carousel. He takes his mobile phone out of his briefcase and switches it on. Our bags arrive at the same time. As we plunge into the sea of waiting Sicilians, I almost lose sight of him. But then I see him walking up to a thin man holding up a sign with a name written on it: Mr. Berenson. Then he is swallowed up by the night.
    And I hear Salvo, my taxi driver, saying to me, “Ciao, Petra. Still carrying that same old battered suitcase?”

R OSARIA S CHIFANI
    S ALVO MAKES THAT REMARK ABOUT THE SUITCASE EVERY time I come to Palermo; it’s a solicitous ritual of his. Because Salvo can’t understand why I’m devoted to this battered suitcase even though I could easily afford a new one. A neat, smooth Signora suitcase. Not this old aluminum thing covered with stickers, which he’s now stowing in his taxi with an indulgent expression on his face.
    Salvo always drives me when I’m in Palermo; he’s done it for years. I’ve known him for so long that he’s gone through three fiancées in that time. Now he’s got another one, and this time