The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia by Petra Reski Read Free Book Online Page B

wears a pair of glasses that sit on his nose like a pince-nez; his center parting looks as if it’s been drawn with a ruler. The Tunisian hotel servant has frozen into a statue, and the old maître d’ serves the breakfast tea with distracted dignity. Anyone who stays at the Centrale Palace is living not in a hotel but in a nineteenth-century Sicilian novel.
    As soon as I enter the lobby, the receptionist bows in greeting. He purses his lips as if to kiss my hand and scatters a few compliments: “Time simply doesn’t pass as far as you’re concerned, Dottoressa !” he says.
    Since the day I was picked up by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, the receptionist has respectfully addressed me as Dottoressa . The lawyer was pleasantly touched not to have had to introduce himself. The receptionist obviously knew his name.
    I have my case brought to my room and rejoin Salvo in the car. To get to the restaurant, we have to turn onto the Via Roma. As it is every Sunday, the Via della Libertà is closed to through traffic. The Sunday evening stroll from the Teatro Politeamato the Teatro Massimo is one of Palermo’s sacred rituals. Wives are dressed up in outfits that look like suits of armor. They hold their handbags pressed under one arm and their husbands under the other. And by the boutique window displays the women sink into a dreamlike state—until their husbands drag them away.
    Shobha is already sitting on the terrace of the Fresco when I get there. Her blond hair flashes in the darkness. Piano music drifts from the restaurant, and sitting on the terrace you look down on the yellow volcanic walls of the Ucciardone prison, an old Hohenstaufen fortress with floodlights and sentries behind armored glass. The mafiosi called the prison Grand Hotel Ucciardone; they had champagne and lobsters delivered until they were released, usually after just a few months. After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, a stay in the Ucciardone temporarily became rather less comfortable. Temporarily. Because lately the prison attracted a certain amount of attention when guards were found to have distributed telefonini among the bosses.
    “You’ve gotten blonder,” Shobha says.
    Every time we see each other again, we behave like an old couple who have been apart for a few weeks and are now looking at each other with a critical eye: Is your hair shorter or longer? Are your earrings new? Yes, they really suit you, and what wonderful shoes you have, I want some pointed shoes like those. We’ve been working together for so long that we’ve decided to stop counting the years, because then anyone would be able to work out how old we are.
    The pianist comes to our table, makes sheep’s eyes at Shobha, and asks if she’ll be coming to eat here again tomorrow,then she could go with him to a concert afterward. Shobha doesn’t even turn around, and says: “I’m busy over the next few weeks. And the next few months, and the next few years as well. I’m sorry. Scusami .”
    And then we stare at the walls of the Hohenstaufen fortress until the pianist wanders back, shoulders drooping, to his piano and plays something that sounds like Chopin’s Funeral March.
    “And your mother?” I ask Shobha.
    “Tomorrow,” Shobha says. “We’ll get to work tomorrow.” Then she adds: “At least it’s a good story. Not something like San Luca.”
    At the end of every report we swear we won’t do any more Mafia stories. Basta . We plan only to cover stories about Sicilian wine and fine hotels. About the wonderful quality of Calabrian olive oil. About Naples without rubbish in the streets.
    Somehow we never manage to put our good intentions into action. Even while we were on the ferry from Sicily to Reggio Calabria we remembered our plan to do a report on something positive at long last. But instead we were sitting a short time later in the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Reggio Calabria, looking at a sea that looked as if it was