Badfellas by Tonino Benacquista Emily Read Page A

got a tin from the little Italian in Antibes.”
    There was a short silence at the thought of the shop, La Rotonda, in the old town.
    “If anyone had ever told me that one day I’d end up in a country where they eat cream,” said Richard.
    “It’s not that it’s not good, I’ve got nothing against it, but my stomach isn’t used to it,” his colleague added.
    “In the restaurant yesterday they put it in the soup, then on the escalope and finally on the apple tart.”
    “Not to mention the butter.”
    “The butter! Mannaggia la miseria! ” Vincent exclaimed.
    “Butter’s not natural, Maggie.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The human body wasn’t made to absorb such fatty substances. Just thinking of that stuff on my stomach lining makes me sweat.”
    “Try the mozzarella instead of talking rubbish.”
    Vincent helped himself, but continued on his theme.
    “Butter impregnates the tissues, it blocks everything, it hardens, it forms a sediment, it turns your arteries into hockey sticks. Olive oil only touches on your insides and slides through, just leaving its scent.”
    “Olive oil is in the Bible.”
    “Don’t worry,” Maggie said. “I’ll go on taking care of you with my home cooking. We’ll hold the line against butter and cream.”
    Following a little ritual established two or three years earlier, Maggie broached the subject of the neighbours. For security reasons, the FBI had the records of almost all the residents of the Rue des Favorites and surrounding streets. Maggie couldn’t resist asking questions about one or two of them – she was curious about the lives of the people she passed in the street every day; she wanted to get to know them without having to associate with them. Was it just the curiosity of a busybody? The fact was that no other busybody in the world had such technical expertise at her disposal.
    “What’s the family at number 12 like?” She asked, pointing a pair of binoculars towards their house.
    “The mother’s a kleptomaniac,” Di Cicco said. “She’s not allowed into the shopping mall at Evreux. The father’s having his third bypass. Nothing much to say about the children, except the little one’s going to have to repeat his year.”
    “Life has been hard for them,” she said, with a little sadness in her tone.
    Fred, who was in the cellar looking through the window onto the street, could guess at the scene taking place opposite. It drove him mad, seeing his wife being so civil to those two dung beetles, and even feeding them. Despite all these years living alongside one another, those two would never be on the same side as him, and for as long as he lived he would make sure they were reminded of it, and keep them at a good distance.
    “Tell them to get fucked, Maggie…”
    Malavita, lying amongst her pillows, seemed to be wondering why her master was making such a racket in the basement. Fred was holding an adjustable spanner and experiencing one of those moments when a man finds his virility being put to the test. He had the preoccupied, pouting expression of someone obliged to peer into the engine of a car, or pretending to understand what he is looking at as he gazes at a fuse box. He was poking around the pipes and the water meter, trying to find some explanation to give his wife about the foul water that had been gushing into the kitchen sink. Like many others before him, he had hoped to solve the problem on his own, and thereby perform a small domestic miracle that would earn him the respect of his family. In the same way as one might kick a tyre, he banged the spanner against the pipe, scratched off a bit of rust, and tried to make somesense out of the spaghetti of pipes disappearing into the moss-covered stonework. He considered cooking as an activity to be a lot less degrading than DIY, even though he had spent a lot of time in hardware shops for other reasons – in the past he had found drills, saws and hammers a great deal more useful for