The Four Corners of Palermo Read Online Free Page A

You know, withthe perennial water shortage, sometimes we find ourselves forced to buy from these people. They charge sky-high prices, but what other choice do we have? Corona bargains hard for the best price, and he turns in an honest day’s work. He’s married to a woman called Mariapia Cuzzupane, age forty, born in Aliminusa. The daughter of a cattle rancher, respectable family. They live on Viale Piemonte, a good part of town, but I don’t have to tell you that. They have one daughter, Rosalba, age eighteen, enrolled at the Liceo Garibaldi. They also tell me that she’s a hot babe.”
    I thanked him and promised that we’d get together for a pizza soon with all our old classmates from the Alberico Gentili elementary school: he was a guy who cared about that kind of thing. Like many Palermitans, he lived stubbornly in the past; the present was nothing more than a deformation, and often a useless one, of what had once been. As proof of the accuracy of this theory, Roberto and my other friends often pointed to the grammar of Sicilian dialect: the only grammatical form of the past tense is the remote past, and there is no future tense. At the very most, if he’s really trying to lay it on, a Palermitan might use the present tense.
    The theory is true.

    The nights of the Spanish World Cup were also nights of police sweeps against the Mafia. The Italian state was doing its best to gather its strength and strike back. Courageous policemen and carabinieri
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under the leadership of magistrates and judges who were every bit as courageous, and whose names are cherished in the memory of our country, carried out numerous arrests. A preliminary attack was launched on Cosa Nostra, and Cosa Nostralashed back with a season of bloodbaths. The first demonstration of sheer Mafia power was unleashed at the behest of Totò Riina’s Corleonese clan on June 16, 1982: a massacre of carabinieri on the Palermo beltway, with the added objective of rubbing out a rival, the Catania mob boss Alfio Ferlito, who was being transferred from one prison to another. The attack came in the late morning, just as the West German team was finishing its warm-up exercises in preparation for the match against Algeria, scheduled to start at 5:15 that afternoon. I showed up on the site of the slaughter with a television crew, which I ordered to stay back behind the police barriers out of respect for the bodies of the three dead carabinieri
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    Then, with a confident step and an irritable expression, I walked past all the barriers that had been set up around the crime scene, until I reached the people reporting to the prefect of police, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, about the circumstances of the bloodbath. I joined them
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    Two cars with the professional killers on board had maneuvered in close to the Carabinieri squad car that was carrying the mob boss Ferlito. Then all hell broke loose, a hail of lead from several AK-47s. None of the carabinieri had a chance to get off a shot. Dalla Chiesa listened as I nodded along with two other young plainclothes officers: everyone assumed that I was just one more investigator. Then one of the two plainclothesmen furrowed his brow as he looked at me. “Excuse me, but who are you?” I wasn’t about to lie: “A reporter.” Dalla Chiesa rolled his eyes to the sky above. His men pushed me out of there fast
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    Rosalba was stretched out next to Marinello, whose fever had subsided. Their bodies, side by side, were an impregnable island.
    “Heart of my hearts, I can feel that you’re better already,” she said, running her hand slowly over his chest.
    He smiled, without the twist of a grimace on his lips.
    “The shot got rid of my fever and the stitches don’t hurt me anymore. The Professore is a good doctor.”
    “He left something for us to eat, too: a couple of rice balls and a bottle of Coca-Cola. He said that you’ll have to stay in bed for a while longer.”
    Marinello automatically checked to make sure he had his