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

now standing in the door to the sacristy. There were only a few minutes before the start of mass; the bells were already ringing. Don Pino Strangio had ebony-black hair and smiled at us winningly, as if he’d just been waiting for us to turn up. Of course, of course, he would love to speak to us, right after mass.
    “Bringing peace to the villages . . . not losing faith . . . because we must give an account of ourselves before God . . . if we could see him with our mortal eyes. . . .” The words rang out over the church square. Don Pino hovered like a spirit over San Luca; his words rang out from the loudspeakers, echoed against the gray, unplastered walls, and crept into the hairy ears of the men sitting not in church but outside the bar, blinking into the milky morning light.
    As in Sicily, churchgoing in San Luca is for the womenfolk. So Don Pino had decided to broadcast his sermons into the church square via loudspeakers. The women who listened to his words were all dressed in black, as if life were a time of endless mourning. Old women, with their thin hair in buns, tightenedtheir wrinkled mouths as the host dissolved on their tongues. Their daughters had faces that could have been carved from olive wood; they wore tight, black skirts, black pullovers, and flat, black shoes, and allowed themselves only one piece of jewelry: a wedding ring. Only the granddaughters were allowed to shine. With blond strands in their hair, Dolce & Gabbana belts, and sequined blouses glittering above their naked midriffs. And during prayers the mothers quietly tugged the blouses down over their daughters’ waistbands.
    At the end of mass, Shobha was surrounded by little girls demanding to have their pictures taken. When Shobha said she didn’t like posed photographs, the little girls turned angry. They hissed: we issue the orders here.
    The women darted back down the alleys like blackbirds and I thought of the wife of the boss Bernardo Provenzano, who had spent fifteen years living underground with him and their children. At one with the Mafia and the Lord God. After she had returned to Corleone, she was a signora . Respected by everyone, a first lady who was allowed to the front of the queue for ricotta. Her husband? Respectable and hardworking, a victim of the Italian judiciary, that was how she described him.
    The men in San Luca drank some more beer before they too disappeared and the village looked uninhabited once again. As if everything human had fled—fled the cement-gray color of everything, the bare lightbulbs that dangled above the lintel, by the trash cans peppered with machine-gun fire. And fled the words But the soul never dies spray-painted on the cemetery wall.
    The dead of Duisburg were buried in the new cemetery which, seen from above San Luca, looked like a holiday resort.Their graves were right beside the entrance: rough cement boxes with rusty iron girders protruding from them. On every grave lay a crucifix with a shrink-wrapped rosary. Don Pino had buried three of the Duisburg victims: Marco Marmo, the hit man who had murdered the wife of the head of the enemy clan at Christmas; Sebastiano Strangio, who owned the Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg; and Francesco Giorgi, at sixteen the youngest victim of the killing spree, and the son of Don Pino’s female cousin. “ Mio cuginetto ,” Don Pino said, “my little cousin.” Francesco, the poor boy, had only wanted to visit his uncle in Germany. And then Don Pino praised the piety of his cousin, the boy’s mother, who was sitting in the front row of the church. Her daughter, Elisa, was playing organ in church when she learned of her brother’s death.
    “In her pain, the mother gazed into the distance,” Don Pino said. “No doubt she wanted to look her son’s murderers in the eyes. But there was no hatred there! She said: ‘I forgive you.’ And lots of people joined in that forgiveness. Perhaps Duisburg was the end of something and a peaceful rebirth would