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it’s serious. Salvo’s very thin, with a profile like a mouse. A mouse with alert, black eyes that seem to consist entirely of pupil. Even in jeans and sneakers, Salvo always tries to look smart. When he puts his hands on the wheel he sticks out his little finger, the way other people do when drinking tea. It’s not as if he’sscrambling to drive me around Palermo, it’s more that he’s doing me a favor—because for some time now he’s become the regular driver for a group of old ladies who play scopa , the Sicilian game played with cards that look like tarot cards. These old-lady cardsharps meet every afternoon, which is why they represent a secure source of income for Salvo: the ladies always have absolute precedence.
    I tap in a text to Shobha: “Where are we eating?” And she answers: “Everything’s shut on Sunday evening. Except Fresco.”
    Fresco is Shobha’s local, a kind of vegetarian hippy restaurant opposite Ucciardone prison. They serve up a passable couscous, with piano accompaniment on Sundays. The pianist has been wooing Shobha, in vain, for years.
    “OK, Fresco,” I reply, and Salvo asks me why I still haven’t got a new phone. He proudly shows me his new super-thin Samsung. Of course, he has two telefonini , like any self-respecting Italian: one for private conversations, one for business. The private one’s reserved exclusively for his fiancées. And his mother.
    We drive silently along the motorway. Cinisi. Carini. Capaci. Each sign represents a case file, a police operation, a raid. Against the Alcamo clan, against the Castellammare del Golfo clan, against the Cinisi clan. Some trials have the names of the places the clans come from; others bear names like film titles: they’re called “mstorm,” or “Golden Market,” or “Akragas.” And behind the film titles lurk mafiosi who look like janitors. Or bank clerks. Every time I come from the airport and see the sign for Cinisi, I can’t help thinking about the boss in hiding, Matteo Messina Denaro—and his submissiveness to Don Tano Badalamenti, an old boss who came from Cinisi and preferred to let his life trickle away in an American jail rather than be disloyalto Cosa Nostra. He spent almost twenty years in a prison in Massachusetts.
    Messina Denaro is seen as the new boss of the Sicilian Mafia: young, brilliant, and on the run. In Sicily the phrase “on the run” sounds as normal as a description of someone’s marital status. Single, married, on the run. I wonder whether the brilliant Messina Denaro would maintain his loyalty to Cosa Nostra even in an American high-security prison. Perhaps he’d be readier to come clean than people might imagine.
    To do me a favor, Salvo puts on Biagio Antonacci’s CD and “S ognami se nevica ,” “Dream of me if it snows.” In Sicily, the metaphor par excellence for unrequited love.
    Few men in Sicily are as sought after as mafiosi on the run. Matteo Messina Denaro met up with ladies from the highest echelons of Trapani society at a hotel in Selinunte—and a short time later had its owner murdered because he didn’t feel he had treated him with sufficient respect. The boss enjoyed himself at the elegant spa of Forte dei Marmi, adorned himself with Rolex watches, fell in love with an Austrian woman, whom he visited and whose telephone is probably still tapped today, and spent part of his time on the run from the police in Bagheria, not far from Palermo, staying with a woman who wrote him pages of love letters: “I have loved you, I love you, and I will love you all my life.” She went to jail for acting as his accomplice. When Messina Denaro hid at this woman’s home, his pursuers were so hot on his heels that they came close to catching him, except that one of the carabinieri had turned off the hidden cameras and given the boss the tip he needed.
    Salvo says: “I don’t know what you women see in this song.” And I can’t give him an answer.
    “What kind of a story are you