Badfellas (5 page)

“Peanut butter…”

“And then you wonder why one American in five is obese.”

“And Coca-Cola…”

The voices were close by, just behind the stack where Maggie was reaching down for a pack of beer. She couldn’t help listening to the hushed conversation between the manager and two of his customers.

“I’ve got nothing against them, but they certainly make themselves at home wherever they are.”

“Of course there were the landings. But we’ve been invaded ever since!”

“In our day, and for our generation, it was nylon stockings and chewing gum, but what about our children?”

“Mine dresses like them, enjoys the same things, listens to the same music.”

“The worst thing is the food they eat. I cook something they like, and all they can think of is to leave the table as quick as they can and rush off to McDonalds.”

Maggie felt hurt. By treating her as a typical American, they had cast doubt on all her goodwill and efforts at integration. It was a cruel irony, particularly for somebody who had been cast out of her country and had lost her civic rights.

“They’ve got no taste in anything, that’s for sure.”

“Barbarians. I know, I’ve been there.”

“And if you tried to settle there,” the manager concluded, “just imagine how that would go down!”

Maggie had suffered enough in the past from all the sidelong glances, the muttering behind her back, the general sarcasm when she appeared in public, the wild rumours which were impossible to disprove. This unlucky threesome had unwittingly stirred up all these memories. The paradox was that if they had invited her to join in their conversation, she would have agreed with a lot of what they said.

“And they want to be the masters of the universe?”

Without revealing anything, she went over to the house-hold-goods section, added three bottles of paraffin and a box of matches to her basket, paid at the cash desk and went out.

Outside, the last rays of the sun were disappearing and afternoon was fading into evening. The staff were beginning to feel tired, the customers were hurrying along, everything was as usual on this March evening at six o’clock, the same rituals, the same sleepy atmosphere.

So what was that smell of burning rubber that was just beginning to reach the nostrils of the cashiers?

One of the customers gave a great scream. The manager looked up from his order book and saw a strange curtain of fire undulating over the shop window. An impenetrable curtain of leaping flame began to spread into the shop.

A warehouseman reacted first and called the fire brigade. The customers looked for an emergency exit. The cashiers just disappeared, while the manager, for
whom the shop and his life were one and the same thing, stood paralysed, hypnotized by the red-and-gold light dancing before his eyes.

The Cholong-sur-Avre volunteer firemen were unable to save the awnings, the display or the merchandise. In fact nothing was saved from the fire, except a case of slightly bruised Granny Smiths.

Belle and her classmates left the
lycée
at the last bell. A few diehards leaned against the gates, cigarette in the lips or mobile in hand, in no hurry to go home, while others rushed off as quickly as they could. She walked some of the way with Estelle and Lina, and then continued on her own along the boulevard Maréchal Foch, without any hesitation about the route. Belle was one of those people who walked with her head high and a light step, curious about everything around her, convinced that the horizon would always be more interesting than the pavement. This attitude summed up her whole personality, this way of always going forwards, confident both in herself and others. She was the opposite of her brother, who would always be marked by the wounds of his childhood; she was able to stay one step ahead of her past, never allowing it to catch up with her, even at the most difficult moments. Nobody except her knew where this strength came from – the sort of strength that is so often lacking in those who have seen their whole lives turned upside down overnight. And even if she was still feeling the tremors from that earthquake, she certainly had no desire for victim status. Instead of wasting energy on regrets, she turned it towards her
future development, no matter what problems there were to surmount. And nothing and nobody would stop her.

An old metallic grey Renault 5 drew up alongside her. Inside it, some young people were trying to attract her attention. They were the seniors who, that same afternoon, had been so overcome by the sight of the new girl’s red bra. They had been determined to get to know her, to make her welcome and show her the sights.

“No thanks, boys…”

She walked on towards her house, amused by the thought of being picked up on the first day in the school. However, she had no need for reassurance about her charms – they had been there for ever, since the day she was born. Her parents had called her Belle, not realizing how apposite the name would be. So much resonance in such a small word. How were they to know that the name would be a problem in France? At that time neither Maggie nor Fred quite knew where France was.

“Oh, please, please, Miss America!”

They were so insistent that Belle began having doubts about the way home.

“Where do you live?”

“Rue des Favorites.”

“It’s that way! Jump in, and we’ll drop you at your house.”

She let herself be persuaded, and climbed into the back. The boys were silent for a moment, surprised at their success. They had expected a refusal, and were thrown by this unexpected turn of events. Perhaps this girl was less shy than the others, a bit more daring?
Americans were so advanced in every way, especially when it came to morals. They glanced at each other surreptitiously and allowed themselves to dream.

“Look, boys, we seem to be going the wrong way.”

Instead of answering, they bombarded her with questions about her life before Cholong. They were tense compared to her, and filled the silences with random remarks; they sought to demonstrate their coolness and savoir-faire, to show that they were sophisticated men of the world; she was amused by such childishness. The car slowed down at the edge of the forest of Vignolet, by the main road that led towards Brittany.

“Why are we stopping?” she asked.

Night had suddenly fallen. The chatter had been replaced by suspicious silences. Belle once again asked them to take her home. The boys got out and quietly exchanged a few words. With a bit of luck they wouldn’t have to try very hard and it would all be like in a film, with a kiss from the new girl, perhaps a few caresses, you never knew, why not. And if it was no good, they could easily play the innocents. Belle was thinking about all the things she had to do when she got home: filling out the forms for the school records, working out her timetable and comparing it with her brother’s, labelling all her school books, making a list of what was missing – it would be a long evening. She stood leaning against the car door with her arms crossed, waiting for one of these two cretins to understand that the outing was over. Before giving up, they made a last attempt, and one of them put a cautious hand on Belle’s shoulder. She let out an exasperated sigh, picked up a tennis racket from the back seat, and with a perfect forehand smashed the side of the racket on the daring one’s nose. The
other one, shaken by this sudden and violent gesture, backed away, but was unable to avoid a sort of backhand volley that nearly took off his ear. Once they were on the ground, their faces covered in blood, Belle knelt down to look at them, with the professionalism of a nurse. She had quite recovered her sweet smile and her goodwill towards her fellow man. She got into the car and, turning towards them once more, said:

“Boys, if that’s the way you go about it, you’re never going to get anywhere with girls.”

She drove off towards the main road whistling a Cole Porter tune, then left the car a hundred metres from the Rue des Favorites and walked the rest of the way. She met her mother at the gate coming back at the same time, and helped her carry in the shopping. Warren, arriving at the same time, shut the gate behind them and all three went into the house.

Frederick, who was feeding the dog, with one knee on the ground, wasn’t surprised to see his entire family coming in at once. He said:

“So – anything new today?”

As if they had rehearsed it, all three replied in chorus:

“Nothing new.”

“Maggie, make me some tea!”

Fred had shouted loud enough from the veranda to wake Malavita, who gave a little growl and went straight back to sleep. Maggie heard, too, but felt no sense of urgency, and remained slumped in front of the television screen in the bedroom. Fred, irritated by the lack of response, risked losing the thread of his inspiration, and left the typewriter.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

Lying back on the bed, annoyed by her husband’s intrusion just at the denouement of the soap plot, she paused the cassette.

“Don’t play the macho Italian with me, will you?”

“But… I’m working, sweetie…”

Maggie had to suppress her irritation at the word “working”, irritation which had been mounting ever since they had arrived in Cholong a month earlier.

“Might we know what it is you’re doing with that typewriter?”

“I’m writing.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Giovanni.”

She only used his real name in extreme situations, either very tense or very tender ones. He was going to have to confess to what he had been doing on the veranda from 10 a.m. onwards, bent over a bakelite antique, and explain to them the full urgency of this project which had filled him with such unusual energy and plunged him into such delicious confusion.

“You can make fools of the neighbours if you like, but please spare me and your kids.”

“I’ve TOLD you, I’m WRITING, for Christ’s sake!”

“You can hardly even read! You couldn’t even write down the things you say! The neighbour at number five told me you were hatching something about the Normandy landings! I had to nod like an idiot… The landings? You don’t even know who Eisenhower was!”

“Fuck the landings, Maggie. That was just a pretext. I’m writing something else.”

“Might I know what?”

“My memoirs.”

At that, Maggie realized that all was lost. She had known her husband for ever, and now it seemed he was no longer the man she had known a month ago, the man whose every gesture and intonation she knew by heart, and understood.

And yet Fred wasn’t lying. He had, with no regard for chronology, been going back, as the whim took him, over the happiest period of his life, the thirty years he had spent at the heart of the New York Mafia, and then the most painful – the time when he turned government witness. Captain Thomas Quintiliani had, after tracking him for four years, succeeded in cornering clan boss Giovanni Manzoni, and had forced him to testify at a trial which had brought down three of the biggest gang leaders, the
capi
who controlled the East Coast. One of them was Don Mimino,
capo di tutti i capi
, the head of all the “five families” in New York.

There had followed the period of the Witness Protection Programme, “WITSEC”, those stinking arrangements that supposedly protected those who had snitched from reprisals. Reliving the most shameful moments of one’s existence was no doubt the price anyone would have to pay for embarking on the writing of their
memoirs. Fred would have to spell out every letter of every forbidden word: snitching, flipping, ratting out on your friends, condemning the oldest of them to sentences ten times their great ages and a thousand times their life expectancy (Don Mimino had copped three hundred and fifty-one years, a number everyone found perplexing, including Quintiliani). Fred would not duck out of it, he would go right to the end of his confession; that was one thing you could count on – he never did anything by halves. In the days when he was in charge of eliminating troublesome types, he would never leave any identifiable pieces lying around; if he was in charge of protection in some particular district, no shopkeeper was allowed to escape his payoff, not even the man selling umbrellas in the street. The hardest part of the story would be reliving the two years spent preparing for the trial; it had been a period of total paranoia, when he moved hotels every four days, surrounded by agents, and only saw his children once a month. Up until that famous morning when he had held up his hand before all of America and taken the oath.