Michael Dibdin - Blood rain

‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’ asked the one called Calogero.

‘He told me not to. He said that he wanted to hear what each of you had to say He said it would reveal a lot about you.’

Each of the men lowered his eyes, trying desperately to remember just what he had said. One thing was certain: the woman would know. She could recall, word for word, what such-and-such or so-and-so had said under torture in the long hours before they were strangled in the house of horrors which the Corleone clan had owned in Palermo, back at the height of their glory Later, she would tell her husband what she had heard, and he would give the appropriate instructions.

‘And what did Binu say?’ the man called Nicolo dared to ask.

‘He said, “Cui bono?”’

The men looked at each other in an apprehensive silence.

‘What dialect is that?’ one of them asked.

‘It’s called Latin,’ the woman went on, picking up her needles again. ‘It means, “Who stands to benefit?”’

There came a nervous guffaw.

‘I didn’t know Binu spoke Latin.’

‘He has a lot of time on his hands,’ the woman said to no one in particular. ‘He’s been reading. And thinking.’

‘Who stands to benefit from what?’ asked Nicolo.

The woman looked at him.

‘From taking our men and leaving them to die in the back of a refrigerated truck after hacking Lillo’s leg off with a chain-saw.’

‘That bastard Limina, of course!’

‘And what did he benefit?’

‘Revenge for his son’s death!’

The woman set her knitting needles down again with the same faint click.

‘But we didn’t kill Tonino Limina.’

‘Of course not. But they think we did.’

The woman reached into some invisible crevice in her garments. A sheet of paper appeared, which she scanned.

‘Bravi!’ she remarked with sullen irony. ‘So far you’ve said all the things that Binu said you would say. Now, here’s his question to you. Who did kill Tonino Limina?’

‘Our rivals in Palermo,’ the white-moustached man replied promptly. ‘The competition there is out to get us for things we’ve done in the past, and the easiest way is to set us up against the Limina family.’

‘Or maybe it’s one of the new enterprises,’ Calogero put in. ‘That nest of snakes in Ragusa for example. The result’s the same. We and the Catanesi exhaust ourselves in a continuing blood feud, and the third party takes advantage.’

‘Or the Third Level,’ the woman said quietly.

A long silence, broken only by the drumming fingers of the man with the restless hands.

‘Them?’ whispered Calogero at length. ‘But they’re finished. They don’t respond any more.’

‘Not to us, no. Because we’re finished, too.’

‘Who says so?’ was the aggressive response.

The woman pointed to the sheet of paper covered in fine, spidery writing.

‘He does. We’ve always been realists, he says. That’s been our strength. And the reality now is that we don’t count any more, except perhaps to be made use of.’

She’s talking like a man, the others all thought. They listened to her words as though to an oracular utterance by a sibyl, because they knew they must be true. Nothing but a knowledge of the truth, communicated through his mouthpiece by her fugitive husband, could have given this dumpy grandmother the absolute male authority she wielded as of right. As though to compensate, the men all started to chatter like women.

‘Maybe they did it themselves.’

‘Murdered their own child?’

‘Of course not! Someone else, of no account, but rigged to look as if it was Tonino.’

‘But through their lawyer they told that magistrate, the one who was just killed, that it wasn’t him.’

‘Since when does anyone tell judges the truth?’

‘Or lawyers, for that matter.’

‘But if it wasn’t Tonino, why did they hit back at us?’

‘Any excuse is good. We’ve seen it before on this island. East versus west. And we know the Messina crowd were in on this.’

‘Who cares why? Kill them all! Let God sort them out.’

‘Who else could have gone after that judge? No one else would dare to try an operation like that in their territory. Besides, no one else was interested. It was the Limina case she was investigating.’

‘I heard that she’d been pulled off that one.’

‘Officially?’

A cynical laugh.

‘Enough of this bullshit!’ shouted Calogero at last. ‘The simple fact is that they have killed five of our men, and if we want to maintain any respect at all, we’re going to have to get even.’

‘Right!’

‘OK!’

‘Let’s do it!’

‘And slowly, if possible. A bomb is too good for them!’

‘Perhaps we should have a word with those blacks that Ignazio was trading on the side before he fell down that mine-shaft. Someone told me that in Somalia they still use crucifixion as a form of execution. Maybe one of them knows how to do it.’

‘We should nail up Don Gaspa and that Rosario side by side.’

‘With a sign reading, “But where’s Christ?”’

All four men burst into laughter. The woman’s voice cut through the companionable male mirth.

‘Who do you mean by them?’

‘The Liminas, of course!’ the elderly man replied, still intoxicated by the wave of testosterone-laden empathy, like back in the old days before all the men of the family had been killed or locked up in cold, remote prisons or forced into concealment in a series of ‘safe houses’, leaving this hag to run the clan by proxy.

The woman laid down her knitting and raised her eyes to the gathered men. She picked up the piece of paper lying before her.

‘“They are like children. Well-meaning, enthusiastic, and dumber than fuck.” His words.’

A shocked silence ensued. No one could contradict her, of course. Maybe they were his words, maybe they weren’t. Keep quiet, they were all thinking. And don’t look like you’re thinking, either. Bite your tongue, set your face, shut up and let someone else take the initiative.

‘“We’ve had our clan wars,”‘ the woman read on, ‘“and look where they’ve got us. The people who want to start that up again are no friends of ours, even if they claim to be. In the past, their motto was control and rule. Now it’s divide and rule. If they succeed in setting the clans at each others’ throats once again, they can do what they like with you, playing one side against the other and both ends against the middle.’“

She picked up her knitting, leaving them to digest this information. The elderly man at the other end of the table tapped his wineglass with one fingernail.

Too bad the Liminas don’t understand that,’ he said.

‘Then we must try to enlighten them,’ the woman replied without looking up.

‘Cut their fucking heads off,’ muttered Calogero. ‘That’ll enlighten those sons of whores soon enough!’

His outburst, designed to surf on a wave of male fellow-feeling, fell flat in a total silence. At length the man called Nicolo sniffed and spoke.

‘With all due respect, signora, how are we to do that? We sent our boys to Messina to explain that we weren’t responsible for the Tonino Limina killing, and to get them to explain that to their friends in Catania. We’ve seen the result. Now what are we supposed to do? Offer to come round to the house and suck their cocks?’

A subdued laugh greeted this welcome, stress-relieving vulgarity. It died away in the woman’s pointed and silent knitting-work. For several minutes no one dared to break it. Then the fourth man, who had not spoken since the beginning, lit another cigarette and coughed apologetically.

‘There might be a way,’ he said.