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doing this time?” Salvo asks. He asks more out of politeness than interest; basically, he thinks a preoccupation with the Mafia is a waste of time. On the one hand. On the other, it fills him with a curious sort of pride that I should come here specially from Venice to tell the Germans what’s happening in Sicily. As if the island’s inhabitants were a people at risk of extinction, of interest to a very few, highly specialized anthropologists. People whom he meets daily in the hall of his building, and whom he otherwise considers overrated. Salvo still lives with his mother, in the district between the Piazza Indipendenza and the Capuchin Crypt, where tourists shudder at the sight of the mummies. It’s a normal district of Palermo, which lives equally normally off the drug trade. Salvo loves describing how the customers meet by the statue of Padre Pio, because the goods are hidden under the saint’s feet. A neighbor on Salvo’s floor has already been arrested four times for membership in the Mafia, and each time he got out of prison he rose a bit higher in the hierarchy. First he committed break-ins, then he collected protection money—that is, he picked up the envelopes that were laid out ready for him, and if there was nothing ready he squeezed superglue into the locks of the shops that hadn’t paid—and now you only ever see him in a suit and tie.
    “I’m writing a portrait of Letizia,” I say.
    “Letizia?” Salvo asks in amazement, because he knows Letizia, and because he thinks I write about people who are either famous or dangerous, and in his eyes Letizia is neither famous nor dangerous, but just the mother of the photographer Shobha.
    “Letizia Battaglia is perhaps your most famous woman photographer,” I say, “your most famous anti-Mafia photographer.”A Sicilian Cartier-Bresson, I’m about to say, if Letizia wouldn’t have taken offense at being compared to someone else. And if Salvo knew who Cartier-Bresson was.
    “ Minchia ,” Salvo says. “I drove her only yesterday, and I didn’t know she was so famous.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I say. When Sicilians say “ minchia ” they’re really impressed. Minchia means “cock” in Sicilian. In fact, Sicily has tried its damnedest to forget Letizia. There is no exhibition in her honor, no archive of her work, nothing. “They pretend I don’t exist,” Letizia always says. “As if I were guilty for the things I’ve seen.”
    There are no reminders of her—and she was always more than a photographer: Letizia was a theater director, city councillor and member of parliament for the anti-Mafia party La Rete. Her surname Battaglia means “battle”—her life’s manifesto.
    “And why are the Germans interested in Letizia right now?” asks Salvo.
    “Because of Duisburg,” I say.
    Because, when there are no corpses, people are inclined to suspect that the Mafia doesn’t exist. Before six Calabrians were murdered in Duisburg, a lot of editors saw my interest in the Mafia as a personal eccentricity, a whim—as if I’d become obsessed with some absurd topic like the life of the giant anteater—to be treated with a degree of indulgence. Okay, if she’s absolutely desperate to write about the Mafia, then for God’s sake let her get on with it; on the other hand, next time get her to write us something about Tuscany.
    And then the massacre in Duisburg happened, and my phone started ringing nonstop. Everyone wanted to send me to Calabria. News Web sites, weekly papers, monthly magazines.“Haven’t you got a mafioso at hand that you could interview?” one editor asked me. Suddenly everyone wanted to know all about the Mafia, to what extent Cosa Nostra differed from the Camorra and whether it was actually imaginable that something like the Duisburg massacre could happen more often. I heard myself lecturing and doling out definitions—that the word Mafia actually referred only to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra; while the Calabrian Mafia was