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called ’Ndrangheta and was at the moment the most successful criminal association in Italy; alongside the Neapolitan Camorra, which, unlike Cosa Nostra with its strictly hierarchical vertical organization, was organized horizontally, which also explained the constant gang wars, everyone wanting to be the boss, and you can’t have that without corpses; and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, the youngest Mafia organization in Italy, which only came into being in the 1980s. And at the end of the phone calls I turned down all the commissions because at the time I happened to be in Poland covering a story—which was a source of relief to me. It was only several months later that I traveled to San Luca, and by that time all interest had subsided again.
    “The Germans must have been really shocked when that thing happened in Duisburg,” Salvo says with concern. And also some worry. “ Che brutta figura ,” he says—what an ugly image we’ve given of ourselves. As if he were personally responsible for his Calabrian compatriots. For the ’Ndrangheta massacre. He looks crestfallen and turns the music up slightly.
    There’s dense traffic on the motorway; the whole of Palermo’s coming back from the weekend. As if impelled by a death wish, the cars dash down the tunnel. The sea shimmers like blackish-blue metal, with a strip of pale moonlight. Up byCarini you can’t see the sea anymore, it’s hidden behind a settlement of shacks that stretches all the way to Palermo and looks like a poor district in Calcutta. The rubbish from the weekend is piled up alongside the motorway. The buildings are mostly one-story houses with rough brick walls, no plaster or cement anywhere; rusty metal rods stick out of the concrete on the roofs. These are Palermo’s holiday homes. They’re all illegal, and they have been for thirty years. In Sicily they call this “surveyors’ architecture.” It has ravaged the island. In Sicily everyone knows a surveyor who will draw up an illegal building plan for a bribe.
    And then we get to Capaci. For a while, there was always a pause when we drove past this place. It didn’t matter who I was with; all my friends, taxi drivers, interviewees fell silent. Not anymore. Now everyone just goes on talking. Before, the only reminder of what had happened was a bit of red crash barrier. Five hundred kilos of explosives on a skateboard in a sewage pipe. Set off by remote control.
    Now, two red marble steles stand here with the names and the date: 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani. One marble stele in each direction. War memorials for a lost battle, as red as the Sicilian soil. Sometimes there’s a faded wreath with a sash that’s already slightly faded: in Sicily things deteriorate very quickly.
    I’d only seen Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino once, from a distance, in the Palace of Justice. Like a lot of other people in those days, I, too, thought they were immortal. When they were murdered, it was felt in Palermo that the killing of the two public prosecutors wasn’t a murder like the previous ones. Not a small death that the city could have shaken off, denied,and forgotten again the following morning, but one that clung to the city in front of everyone’s eyes. “ È andata oltre ,” people said, things have gone too far. For the first time, Sicily could no longer dispute the existence of the Mafia, and the reaction was one of catharsis. Temporarily.
    “The mafiosi will pay for it,” Rosaria had said. We were sitting in a bar not far from the Teatro Politeama, at a white marble table that had been scrubbed till it had lost its sheen, when Rosaria suddenly grabbed my wrist and said: “They’ll pay for it, on the earth and in the hereafter.” What other point would there be in their going on living after committing those murders? Were they never to be punished? Then life in general would have no point, no point at all. “There must