Alex Perry - The Good Mothers - The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia

Carlo left Denise with her Aunt Renata at 6.30 p.m. at Bar Barbara, a Chinese-run café on Piazza Baiamonti at the end of Viale Montello, then drove off to fetch Lea. Denise ordered an espresso. Renata said dinner was minestrone and cold cuts. Denise told her aunt she wasn’t all that hungry, so she and Renata went to an Asian supermarket a few doors down to buy her a small tray of sushi. Denise tried to pay but Renata wouldn’t hear of it.

Looking back, Denise would say it was around then that the make-believe stopped. Back at her cousin’s second-floor apartment in Viale Montello, Denise ate her sushi alone. Then she sat with Renata, Domenico and Andrea as they had their soup and meat in front of the TV. Far from the family get-together Carlo had described, her cousins were in and out all evening. Her Uncle Giuseppe wasn’t even home, which was doubly strange as there was a big game that night, AC Milan away to Barcelona. There was something else, too. When Denise had spent time with Renata before, she remembered thinking that her aunt was a jealous wife, always calling Giuseppe to ask where he was, who he was with, what he was doing and when he was coming home. That night, Denise noticed, Renata didn’t call Giuseppe once.

Denise, who after years on the run had developed a sixth sense for these things, began to feel something was off. Around 8 p.m. she called her mother. Lea’s phone was unobtainable. That was odd too. Lea always made sure her phone was charged. Denise sent her mother a text. ‘Something like “Where the hell are you?”’ Denise said later in court.

The big game started at 8.40 p.m. Barcelona scored quickly. Denise texted Lea a couple more times. Still no answer. Renata told Denise not to worry about smoking in front of the family – no one would tell Carlo – and as the evening wore on, Denise found she was chain-smoking. Her cousins groaned as Barcelona scored a second goal just before half-time. Sometime after 9 p.m., just when Denise was beginning to feel truly unnerved, Giuseppe stuck his head around the door, registered the score and Denise’s presence, then left again. A few minutes after that, Denise’s phone rang. It was Carlo. He would be over in a few minutes to pick Denise up to take her to the station. She should wait for him downstairs at her Uncle Vito’s first-floor apartment.

Denise kissed her cousins and her aunt goodbye, then took the stairs to Vito’s. Carlo hadn’t arrived so Vito’s wife, Giuseppina, made coffee. It was after 9.30 p.m. now – more than three hours since Denise had last heard from her mother – and she was fighting a rising sense of panic. After a while, Vito appeared at the door. Behind him, down the corridor, Denise caught a glimpse of her father at the entrance to another apartment. She hadn’t even known Carlo was in the building. Instead of fetching her, he was talking to his brother Giuseppe and two other men. Carlo glanced at his daughter, and called over that she should wait for him in the car. Denise went down to the street and found the Chrysler. Lea wasn’t in it. By now, it was 10 p.m. When Carlo got in, Denise asked him immediately: ‘Where’s my mother?’

‘I left her around the corner,’ replied Carlo. ‘She didn’t want to come in and see everyone.’

Carlo drove in silence to a street behind Viale Montello. Denise regarded him. He looked upset, she thought. The way he was driving, barely focusing on the road. ‘ Scossato ,’ she said later. Shaken.

When they turned the corner, Lea wasn’t there. Denise was about to speak when Carlo cut her off. Lea wasn’t waiting for them, said Carlo, because what had happened was that Lea had asked him for money and he had given her 200 euros but she had screamed at him that it wasn’t enough, so he had given her another 200 but she’d stormed off anyway. They hadn’t eaten dinner. Actually, said Carlo, he hadn’t eaten at all.

Carlo fell silent. Denise said nothing.

You know what your mother’s like, said Carlo. There’s nothing anyone can do.

Carefully, Denise asked her father, ‘Where is my mother now?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Carlo.

Denise thought her father was a terrible liar. ‘I didn’t believe him for a nanosecond,’ she said. ‘Not one word.’ All his kindness over the last few days, all the opening doors, fetching coats and driving them around – his whole Milanese bella figura act – all of it was gone. Carlo appeared to have regressed. He seemed raw, almost primal. He wouldn’t even look at her. And suddenly Denise understood. The dinner with her cousins. The calls to Lea that wouldn’t go through. The endless hanging around. The urgent discussion between the men in the apartment opposite. Lea had been right all along. Denise, who had begged her mother to let them go to Milan, had been catastrophically wrong. ‘I knew ,’ said Denise. ‘I knew immediately.’

Denise understood two more things. First: it was already too late. Denise hadn’t spoken to her mother for three and a half hours. Lea never turned off her phone for that long and certainly not before telling Denise. It’s done , thought Denise. He’s already had time .

Second: confronting her father would be suicide. If she was to survive, in that moment she had to accept Lea’s fate and fix it in her mind not as possible or reversible but as certain and final. At the same time, she had to convince her father that she had no idea about what had happened, when in reality she had no doubt at all. ‘I understood there was very little I could do for my mother now,’ said Denise. ‘But I couldn’t let him understand me .’ Inwardly, Denise forced her mind into a tight, past-tense dead end. ‘They’ve done what they had to do,’ she told herself. ‘This was how it was always going to end. This was inevitable.’ Outwardly, she played herself as she might have been a few minutes earlier: a worried daughter looking for her missing mother. The speed of events helped. It was absurd, even unreal, how in a moment Denise had lost her mother, her best friend and the only person who had ever truly known her. She didn’t have to pretend to be struggling to catch up. She even had the feeling that if she willed it hard enough, she might bring Lea back to life.

It was in this state, with Carlo in a daze and Denise acting like there was still hope in the world, that father and daughter drove all over Milan. ‘We went to all the places we had been,’ said Denise. ‘Where we’d had a drink, where we’d eaten pizza, the hotel where we had stayed, over to Sempione Park. We went to a local café, a shopping centre, the McDonald’s where we had lunch and the train station, where my father bought two tickets for my mother and me. We went all over the city. I was phoning and texting my mother all the time. And of course, we found nothing and nobody.’

Around midnight, just after the train to Calabria had departed, Denise’s phone rang. Denise was startled to read the word ‘mama’ on the screen. But the voice on the other end belonged to her Aunt Marisa, Lea’s sister in Pagliarelle, and Denise remembered that she had borrowed her cousin’s phone before leaving for Milan.

Gathering herself, Denise told Marisa that Lea was nowhere to be found and that they had just missed their train back to Calabria. ‘Have you heard from her?’ Denise asked her aunt. ‘Did she call you?’

Aunt Marisa replied she had had a missed call from Lea sometime after 6.30 p.m. but hadn’t been able to reach her since. Marisa was calling to check that everything was all right. Denise replied that Lea’s phone had been dead all night.

‘They made her disappear,’ Marisa told Denise, just like that, with Carlo sitting right next to Denise in the car.

‘She was so matter-of-fact,’ Denise said. ‘Like she assumed we all expected it. Like we all felt the same.’