My mother’s grey eyes were bloodshot and tired. She had given me the gift of life, but also her exact hand shape, her thin ankles and her inclination to speak only when necessary. I watched as she walked around the house – our house, the place where I had spent my childhood. I swung between sweet memories and horrible nightmares. The harmony of her physique made me emotional – time and life had taken their toll. Unlike my father, my mother never liked to show her emotions. She’d always been there for me, she’d always been kind and gentle, sweet like one of the songs which I knew off by heart from hearing her sing them when I was little. At the same time, she appeared cold to those who didn’t know her well – she had fair skin and hair, a northern European trait that she had inherited from my granddad, who had been a sailor and a mandolin player. The hugs were few, the kisses even rarer but she’d always been like that. Her love had taken a different path with me and my brother Fabrizio; yet, it was incessant and enduring. Age hadn’t changed her.
That night I returned to the police station, where my brother – fragile and confused like a child who had woken up to discover that his dad wasn’t there any more – was due to spend the night. My mother and I had hugged one another for a time that seemed to last an eternity. I had stopped by her house, before returning to Monica and the kids. I sensed that, through the sobbing and the weeping, we had managed to drown at least some of the pain.
They were keeping my brother in custody. They’d called me and I had arrived at the station, still incredulous. They didn’t let me talk to him – they asked me to leave after reassuring me that my client was well and that he was available to meet the magistrate.
“This can’t be true, Roberto,” my mother had repeated, as I hugged her. I knew that, deep inside, she wasn’t just referring to the accusation that the police had charged Fabrizio with. Neither me, nor my mother, could believe that an eternal child like my brother had been handcuffed and kept in custody in a jail. When I thought about the whole series of events, I had the impression that the story was only a figment of my imagination.
I began to accept the reality of things when I read the newspapers the following morning. My brother’s newspaper was very blunt about the news. Perhaps for the first time in its long history of ambiguities and uncertainties, the newspaper had a surprisingly clear, biased perspective on this piece of news. The editorial manager himself had written one of the most forceful articles I’d ever read. In the article, he accused the police of charging Fabrizio unjustly; he also accused them of excessively delaying the circulation of an official notification of the reasons why Fabrizio was charged with murder. The title of the article was When a journalist goes to jail and some of the heated lines read like this:
We are certain that our colleague is totally innocent and we wonder how many police officers will end up in trouble for having accused Fabrizio Corsaro of such a terrible murder. This is a terrible, incomprehensible situation, and Fabrizio’s relatives are suffering together with him.
However, despite there being great support from other newspapers in several articles, one of the articles I read stood out for revealing details that had been ignored by everyone else – it was an article from an online journal which many policemen enjoyed reading. This article defended the police by discussing some inconsistencies in Fabrizio’s report of the events – in particular, the article insinuated that Fabrizio had been vague about the time he had found the body and that there was some kind of connection between the victim and my brother. Later in the morning, during a press conference, Aronica described in detail the ‘watertight, clear evidence’ that had led him to accuse Fabrizio Corsaro of murdering the usurer. The press conference was held just as I was meeting my brother in the Ucciardone prison.
I didn’t close my eyes that night. I stared at the ceiling in my bedroom with Monica, as we alternated between moments of silence to words of incredulity and discouragement until 3 a.m. The rest of the night was spent listening to Giacomo snore – he was only a year and three months old, but he slept as heavily as a drunken old man. I went to visit Maria early in the morning. She looked like a shirt that had been worn for seven days in a row. When I entered the house, I noticed that she struggled to look me in the eye.
“I might be able to speak to him in the morning,” I said to her. I sat in the armchair Fabrizio used to enjoy watching films from with me when we were little. Maria nodded and turned away. Then, after a long period of silence, she burst into tears.
“It’s my fault,” she muttered, sobbing.
“What are you on about? It’s not your fault.”
Maria hung onto my arm. She was shaking.
“It’s my uncle Valentino.”
I stared at her, looking perplexed. She carried on crying. I stood up to get her some water. When she felt a little better, I asked her to explain.
She summarised the story only in general terms – all the other details I learned directly from Ambrosetti and Pietro Carmelo La Piana, also known as Pierre, during an embarrassing encounter. Valentino’s boyfriend was addicted to gambling, and had spent his days playing online poker and betting on horse races. I had met some people of this persuasion before in my job, and I knew that all of them, with no exceptions, always met a terrible end. Pierre had incurred a huge debt with Onofrio Palillo, who used the back of his convenience store – sometimes even his apartment – as an office to do his business. Some of Pierre’s friends – most likely people who were part of the Mafia – had introduced him to Palillo. Pierre had fallen behind with his payments soon afterwards. A sinewy young man with highlights in his hair had worked with Palillo, it had been his job to communicate with the clients and carry out any other dirty jobs that needed doing. This man had almost certainly been part of the Mafia, and it had been him that had threatened Pierre. If Pierre had not paid the first instalment of his overdue debt within the following five days, he was going to be made to ‘shit blood’. The old Ambrosetti had helped Pierre by paying the instalments with money from his savings, he hadn’t wanted his lover getting into trouble. Ambrosetti had then fallen quickly into debt after paying Palillo all the money he had in different instalments, each time struggling more and more. The police had found Ambrosetti’s details in Palillo’s notebook – the uncle had been interviewed by the police but he hadn’t spoken about it to anyone (not even to his niece or to my brother) because he was ashamed.
That is how I learned of my brother Fabrizio’s alleged motive for the murder of Onofrio Palillo. I almost laughed at the whole situation – the idea that such a self-oriented man like my brother Fabrizio could have killed a man as a favour to the lover of his girlfriend’s gay uncle Valentino Ambrosetti was just absurd.
I kept up with events by following the reports of the press conference held that morning as I was visiting my brother.
I waited for him in the same hall that I had waited for several other clients of mine over the previous years. That morning, however, the hall seemed slightly different – the colours, the smells, the level of humidity and every little noise. I realised for the first time that the hall was becoming part of my life. Chills ran through my body when Fabrizio entered the room with an expression of sufferance and distress.
I hugged him, without saying a word. The policeman who accompanied him didn’t seem to like this prolonged physical contact.
“He’s my brother,” I informed him, raising my hand in a sign of apology. I sat in front of Fabrizio.
My brother leaned his elbows on the table, his hands were shaking and his face looked even more distressed in close proximity. He breathed in deeply and looked me in the eyes. Our eyes are, according to most of the people that we knew, the only feature that we have in common.
“Get me out of here, please,” he said, without changing his facial expression.
“I will,” I answered, nodding.
“If you can’t do it with your words and your papers, then use a tractor and smash the prison wall. If not, I’ll just use a spoon to tunnel my way out of this fucking place.”
I smiled.
“What’s the film? The Count of Montecristo? Oh, wait, maybe it’s—”
“Escape from Alcatraz. Now let’s stop talking about fucking films and let’s get me out of here.”
He hadn’t changed – he was pretending to be strong to exorcise the fear. I knew him well. The trick worked on me, however, and I felt comforted by his behaviour.
“First of all, how are you?”
“Let’s skip the empty talk.”
“How have they been treating you?”
“There’s no room service. Netflix doesn’t work well either.”
“Alright, let’s talk about serious stuff – I brought you something, some bed sheets, cigarettes, books and other things. I left them with the guards. If you need anything else, just let me know.”
“I need…” he raised his voice as he said it, then swallowed down his anger.
“I need you to get me out of here, Roberto.”
“Tell me about the interrogation.”
He told me as much as he remembered, in as much detail as he could. Detail was his job, after all. I listened, taking notes on what he said.
“Uncle Ambrosetti didn’t tell you anything?” I asked, after he had finished.
Fabrizio shook his head, he looked afflicted. His baby face was still evident under his newly grown scruff. Seeing him there made me feel worse than I’d expected.
“I believe that he was trying to tell me something, but we were interrupted.”
“I don’t know what they’re thinking, but they really don’t have any strong evidence to charge you.”
My brother punched the table.
“Did you only just realise that, Roberto? What have you been thinking? That I was a murderer? For fuck’s sake!”
“Calm down – don’t talk rubbish.”
I raised my voice enough to calm him down. Fabrizio rubbed his face vigorously with both hands.
“Maybe we should find that guy who asked the time… He could give me a good alibi. I was smoking inside my car at five, I couldn’t have fucking killed Palillo.”
That was fair enough. But it was easier said than done. I had to find a foreign man in Palermo – perhaps an English or an American man, or maybe neither. All I knew about this man was that he didn’t have a watch and that he walked along via Maqueda ten days ago. It would have been easier to meet the Queen of England, or to let Fabrizio spoon his way out of the prison behind a poster of Rita Hayworth, like Tim Robbins did in Shawshank Redemption.
“We’ll find him. He’ll help us. I’ll get you out of here. You might be able to get house arrest.”
“What do you do to get house arrest? You throw a party?”
I smiled, lowering my eyes to the papers. I was about to cry. Fabrizio noticed.
“How’s Mum?”
“She’s okay – she sends you a kiss.”
“Don’t let her come here. Never. She mustn’t lay a foot in here. I’m serious, Roberto.”
I nodded and stood up.
“I don’t want Maria to come and visit me, either.”
“Maria feels guilty about her uncle.”
“Tell her that we can’t choose our dickhead relatives. If she’s not convinced, tell her about your brother.”
I grabbed him and hugged him.
“Hang on in there, brother.”
I turned round, feeling nauseous. I was angry like a grizzly bear who’d had her cubs taken away.
“Goodbye, brother,” he said, as the guards took him away.
“You never call me ‘brother’,” I muttered. My sight was blurred by tears. I didn’t turn round.
*
The detention of Fabrizio Corsaro was confirmed by the magistrate Amato – a man who’d spent very little time in the public prosecutor’s office, preferring to spend his time on his tennis commitments instead. As expected, the examining magistrate, Lombardo, had ordered the precautionary imprisonment of Fabrizio.
“How can he think there’s a danger that he will abscond?” I pointed out to my colleague Gaetano that Fabrizio had been dead quiet during the first ten days following the murder.
“Is that the only reason why his detention was confirmed?”
“No, they mentioned the fact that he could contaminate the evidence. It’s disgusting.”
I was annoyed with the examining magistrate who didn’t seem to know much about the law, even though he had taken a decision that few other magistrates would have made regarding my brother. The circumstantial evidence against him – or at least the details that were noted down in bad hand writing on the documentation that supported my brother’s detention – was thinner than a sheet of paper.
I was out of my mind. The world had gone crazy and I was going crazy with it. That night I shouted at my kids – a habit that was typical of my wife only in the frequent moments of wrath that she experienced when she was possessed by the demon of anger. Fabrizio was in jail, my mother couldn’t stop crying, Maria wouldn’t eat a single meal and was considering leaving the house to go and live in a convent or god knows where else. Last but not least, fate had laid another trap for me – Valeria’s disease and the pain that came with it.
The surgical operation hadn’t gone as well as we hoped it would. The cancer had been removed, but a number of nasty cells remained attached to her lungs. Her sister burst into tears when she explained everything to me outside the hospital where Valeria lay recovering. I’d never seen someone suffer so much since my Dad died.
I lost my faith in God slowly, what used to comfort me now appeared as an alien memory of a bygone era. There was no room for God in my home now. My only goal was to bite the bullet, stand strong, and try not to lose my balance and lucidity.
As for my work, Dario and Luciana – the two young apprentices who had been working with me for a while – took charge of my duties. I authorised Gaetano, the ex-policeman and investigator who had been working with me for years, to unearth as much information about Palillo as possible, especially anything that was related to his criminal activities.
“I want to know every detail. I want to know the profiles of his victims, who was in charge with threatening or beating them up if they didn’t pay. I want to know the women or the men that he slept with. I want to know who his friends were, if someone like him could ever have any friends. I want to know who his enemies were. I want to know how many hairs that motherfucker had on his head. Do you understand, Gaetano?”
He nodded silently, revealing an unusually tolerant side to his character. He understood me, and he loved me in his own way – I was sure about that.
“What about the watchless American guy?”
“We need to find him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am – do you think you’re here to sit around with your dick in your hand?”
“I’m sure you’re aware that our chances of finding him are almost zero. The search will take a huge amount of time, time that we could use more wisely.”
He was damn right, that young man, but the person in prison wasn’t just anyone – it was my brother. I hadn’t slept for days.
“Find the time to find him. You should be starting now – you won’t find anything in this office,” I discharged him abruptly.
He stood up and limped out of the office. He turned round before leaving the room and looked at me with the ghost of a smile. ‘I’m on your side,’ that smile was saying to me. It didn’t make me feel any better. I felt like I was about to cross the Pacific Ocean on an inflatable raft. I took off my glasses and massaged my temples for a while, trying to put some order to the ideas that I had in my mind. I spent a long time like this, silently, until I reached the conclusion that I needed help.
And I knew the person who would come to my aid.