Badfellas (22 page)

“I didn’t think alcohol was allowed in jail.”

“The only thing that’s not allowed where he is, is credit. Anyway, he’s part of the scenery there, they practically allow him to go out to buy his packet of tobacco. He plays cards with the guards, plays the mediator when there’s a fight, he’s always been a good spokesman. He says it’s not a good example to follow.”

As he talked, Stu went on packing the bottles in the box, wrapping each one in a cylinder of corrugated cardboard for protection. Failing that, a magazine rolled round a bottle did just as well. He picked up the 1972
Playboy
to wrap the last of the six, and was stopped by Donny’s horrified cry.

“Linda Mae!”

And holding his beloved against his heart, he made a momentous decision:

“Whether you help me or not, Stu, I’m going to find her. And I’ll tell her what she means to me.”

“Technically she could be your grandma.”

Stu picked up the other magazine lying on the table and tried to read the title

“The what…
Gazette
?… What language is this crap?”

“God knows, you find everything in those containers.”

Stu didn’t enquire any further and rolled the
Jules Vallès Gazette
around the black liqueur, which was now perfectly wedged in with the five others. He stuck the address onto the box: James Thomas Centre, 14 Hazen Street, Rykers Island, NY 11370, and made two string handles for easy carrying – he’d been doing this for a while.

“Supposing you find her one day, what are you going to say to her, your Miss May 1972?”

Donny thought for a while before answering:

“That I still believe in her.”

Rykers Island, the largest prison in Manhattan, New York, was home to seventeen thousand inmates, men and women, scattered throughout ten separate buildings. The island was a sort of state within a state, less than six miles from the Empire State Building, and it was the largest penal institution in the world. The preserve of the senior inhabitants could be found, well away from the others, in a building called the James Thomas Centre, in honour of the first African American prison guard. On this Mount Olympus of the underworld, there reigned several living legends of crime, major figures from the Mob, the last of the great mythical outlaws whom the public had never tired of hearing about. Each of them was serving sentences of up to four hundred years, long enough to die behind bars, be born and die again several times over. In order to be a member of this exclusive long-sentence club, you had to have been sent down for a minimum of two hundred and fifty years without parole.

And so it was that in this senior preserve, time was perceived differently to anywhere else.

These twenty inmates lived in exceptionally comfortable conditions; they were famous, and mostly rich; they had the sort of lawyers you would associate with the largest of trust funds, and their good relationship with the authorities had transformed their status into that of permanent residents rather than prisoners, and their cells into apartments comparable with the best to be found in central Manhattan. They would all die there some day, but none of them were in a particular hurry to do so.

That afternoon, two of the residents, who had been friends for four years (in their timescale, just time for a handshake), were sitting and chatting in their armchairs, smoking the ritual post-prandial cigar. The younger man, who had nonetheless been there longest, was the terrorist Erwan Dougherty; he had invited his neighbour opposite, Don Mimino, who was twenty years older than him, the godfather of all the godfathers of the Italian Mafia, who had been incarcerated for six years. Erwan was very cautious about all contact with others – he had remained in total silence for nearly eight years – and liked Don Mimino for his old-world manners, and his philosophy of life, which seemed to come from another era, as well as the quality of his conversation, which was only equalled by the quality of his silences. For the venerable Italian, the Irishman’s value lay in the fact that he was the only other Catholic in the building.

“I’ve decided to learn my native language,” announced Don Mimino.

“What do you mean?”

“I speak a sort of Sicilian dialect that was incomprehensible even in the next village. You only hear it nowadays in some parts of New Jersey! What I want to learn is the
lingua madre
, the language they speak in Siena. I want to be able to read Dante in the original. They say it’s great stuff. I’ve worked out that if I take a course in medieval Italian, I should be able to get through the
Divina Commedia
within five or six years.”

In the senior preserve, embarking on long courses of study was desirable for many reasons; most of them saw it as a better way of passing the time than exercise or television. But it wasn’t just that.

“Then I’ll move on to English,” he continued. “I’ve lived here for sixty years, and all I can talk is a mixture of immigrant patois and street slang, and I’m not proud of that. My ambition is to read
Moby Dick
without having to look up words at every page.”

It wasn’t just a matter of killing time, it was a way of finding a meaning, or even several, to this sentence which defied any understanding. How could you envisage the next three hundred years without some kind of purpose?

“I started late with Melville,” Erwan said. “When I got here, I first of all read the whole of Conrad and the whole of Dickens, then the whole of Joyce – he was from Dublin, like my parents. Then I started on a law course which took me eight years.”

Law was the most popular choice, followed by psychology, with literature a poor third. Some wanted to explore the workings of the legal code, discover hidden meanings and traps, and fully grasp the details of what exactly had caused them to end up on this island. Erwan, for example, had passed his bar exams so as to
reopen his file and conduct his own defence. Psychology and allied subjects were also much in demand, anything concerning the mechanism of the human mind, starting with their own – indeed some simply went straight into analysis – this in order to put the troubles of the past in their place and then to be able to face the future with serenity. Psychology was also a way into other disciplines, and it helped them to understand the laws governing groups and hierarchies. In the senior section you had the opportunity to embark on a subject and expect to fully master it, exhausting it right down to the smallest detail, while taking daily care to update the sum of knowledge. Who, in the outside world, could possibly hope to achieve such thoroughness?

Other inmates studied with the sole aim of gaining good conduct points and achieving parole, which could knock ten or fifteen years off a sentence. Some of the more determined inmates had managed to reduce their sentences from a hundred and sixty to a hundred and fifty years.

Unlike the rest of the world, the Rykers seniors did not see death as the final reckoning. The final reckoning, for them, would be their first day of freedom. They had to cling on to the idea that one day, in two or three centuries’ time, they would walk free and set off to discover a new world. Then there would be plenty of time to actually die.

“Then what?” Erwan asked, relighting his Romeo y Julieta.

“Well, then I might be tempted by one or two of the Asian languages. I spent so many years fighting the Japanese and Chinese Mafias that I think it might be time to start trying to understand how these guys work, and speaking their language might help.”

“When I finished my diploma in Chinese medicine, I studied Taoism and learned about their techniques for longevity, and that led naturally on to Tai Chi. Some of the legends tell of ancient masters who lived for between nine hundred and a thousand years.”

“I gave up all forms of physical activity at an early age.”

“You’ll come round to it, Don Mimino. Not immediately, but you’ll come round to it eventually.”

“We’ll see. I’ll study ancient medicine, and then specialize in rheumatology. My back is killing me…”

Someone knocked at the door. Unlike those of other cells, the senior ones were only closed with doors and partitions, and only had bars on the windows. “Chief” Morales, the head guard of the West Wing, which included the senior section, came in, carrying a box.

“It’s my idiot nephew’s regular parcel,” Erwan said, cutting it open with a knife. “You’ll have a drop of liqueur with us, Chief?”

“Sorry, haven’t got time. Block B is playing up.”

The guard, just as a formality, glanced inside the box, weighed up a couple of bottles, and left the cell. Chief Morales, despite his youth, was well respected by the inmates for his good sense and willingness to solve problems.

“We’ll miss him when he retires,” said Don Mimino.

Erwan opened a bottle and sniffed the still-fresh aroma of coffee.

“A guy from Milan introduced me to this when he was staying here, back in the Seventies. It’s less creamy than Irish coffee, less sickly. Between you and me, I’ve never really liked Irish whiskey either.”

Don Mimino took a sip from the little black glass his host handed to him.

“Buono
.”

Erwan unpacked the five other bottles, put them in the cupboard and gathered the wrapping paper up into a pile. He was about to put them in the bin when his eye fell on the
Jules Vallès Gazette
.

“Hey, Don, is that French?”

The old Italian put on his glasses and inspected the cover.

“I think so, yes.”

“I’m not much good at languages, but I might have liked French. I’ll think about it.”

“A lot of irregular verbs, they say.”

“Suppose we did it together, Don Mimino? That’s an idea! In four years we’ll be fluent, and I suggest we make French the official language during liqueur time. Could be fun!”

“You’re all mad, you Irish…”

They clinked glasses and knocked back their drinks. Don Mimino, out of idle curiosity, took the
Jules Vallès Gazette
back to his cell, to study it in peace. He was tempted by the idea of learning French for just one reason: he would be able to watch the films on the Classics Channel without having to read the subtitles; he found French police films from the Fifties much closer to reality than American ones from the same era. Oddly he felt himself to be closer to Jean Gabin than George Raft.

He spent the afternoon learning by heart the subjunctive endings of the auxiliary verbs
essere
and
avere
. Then he dined alone in his cell, and dozed off in front of a variety show on Rai Due which he got on satellite TV. Late that night, he woke up, worried about having insomnia, couldn’t sleep, and picked up the
Jules Vallès
Gazette
. Really, he thought, it was a difficult language… Learning Chinese pictograms would be easier than this. But still, in fifty or sixty years, who knew? Before closing the magazine and trying to get back to sleep, Don Mimino’s tired eyes caught sight of one line of text at the bottom of a column. Just more words, but this time in a familiar language.

Boris Godunov? If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me!

He sat up in bed, his old vertebrae cracking. The piece was signed by a certain Warren Blake.

If it’s good enough for you…

That pun belonged to him, Maurizio Gallone, known in forty states as Don Mimino.

…it’s good enough for me!

The few times he had crossed paths with the son of that motherfucker Manzoni, the boy had reminded him of the joke, it had become a sort of ritual between them. Besides, they had nothing else to say to one another.

And as for the three hundred and forty-five years he had left on this island, well, he owed them to the boy’s father, Giovanni Manzoni.

The Don didn’t need to learn French to understand where the magazine came from:
written and edited by the pupils of the Lycée Jules Vallès, Cholong-sur-Avre, Normandy
.

He had to make a telephone call, and it was urgent.

He yelled down the corridor, waking up Chief Morales.

None of the four Blakes had ever tried to be loved – they had never sought any favours. And yet they had all in different ways found themselves becoming increasingly popular in larger and larger, sometimes overlapping, circles. If you crossed paths with one of them, you would soon hear about another, and then a third, through coincidental connections. They were talked about at school, in the market, so much so that the rumour had now spread throughout the town that this was a quite exceptional family.

Maggie’s voluntary work for various charitable organizations had become well known. People praised her courage as well as her discretion, and they admired her energy and commitment. She was active in the preparations for the town fair and the school concert; she helped with the information campaign about the sorting of domestic rubbish; she attended residents’ meetings; she spent two afternoons a week cataloguing at the local library; and when there was a one-or two-hour gap in her timetable, she laid the foundations for her own charitable enterprise, which she would soon be putting before the town council. The more demands that were made on her, the more she rose to the occasion, and if, from time to time, she weakened, and began to find that the whole idea of charity was losing its charm, she would be needled back into action by the cruel memory of the past; remorse would drive
her on, like a sharp pike in the back of a condemned man. Anyway, what mattered was not the reasons for her altruistic behaviour, but its results – after all, she had no interest in what drove the other volunteers to help total strangers. At the very start of the exercise, she had been curious about their motives, and had identified several types. There were the sufferers, who devoted themselves to others in order to escape from themselves. Then there were the unhappy ones, who gave because they had never received, and the opposite – the privileged and the idle, who wanted to find a way to pass the time. There were believers, who, under a halo of self-sacrifice, worked for the poor with half an eye on their own holy reflection; these people had a special expression as they worked, a kind but controlled smile, arms wide open like vales of tears, eyes moistened by all the misery they had witnessed. You could also find the progressive thinker, looking to others to salve his conscience; the plain fact of helping the disinherited brought him an extraordinary sense of intellectual well-being. Others expected to expiate their sins by one single action. Still others went against their own natures and stopped justifying their cynicism about the decadence of the world. And there were also those who, without realizing it, were finally growing up.