and so you could see kids and young men who might be born into peasant families walking around in designer clothing there was this one store in particular that made millions off the clans because the owners were pretty perceptive and they understood that these people not only wanted designer clothing but they wanted it flashy and garish the shop was called Eldorado and they started ordering all this somewhat strange clothing because in the eighties there was a penchant for the exaggerated and absurd there were shirts that had instead of a normal collar nineteenth century collars for example a monstrosity but even so a shirt might wind up costing you three hundred and fifty dollars that is to say you’d walk into this store and you’d leave dressed like a clown after paying a thousand dollars for a pair of pants a shirt and a sweater so who could afford to shop there no one but the bosses and their made men and in fact the muschilli would accompany the sons of the boss to this store and they’d be given presents clothing money cigarettes cocaine and girls the so-called sluts or zoccole that I was talking about before and maybe they’d get a free car and like that

in our town the clan of the Bardellinos sort of created their own special neighborhood in an outlying area known as the zona infetta the infected zone that was given that name because it used to be marshy there they built enormous million dollar houses in every style imaginable and possible there was a house in the style of Mario Botta shaped like a brick with lots of little red bricks and another house was a white imitation Victorian with side wings and pillars these were all houses built by made men in the clan or in any case prominent townspeople who had made money with the clan and they all had underground bunkers of various sizes automatic security gates closed circuit television cameras alarms security systems that the CIA only dreams about and armed guards walking the perimeter night and day that part of town is filled with underground bunkers but to defeat these people all you’d really need to do is find the contractor or the bricklayers that built the bunkers because it’s down underneath the houses that the criminal heart of this town beats it’s down there that the decisions are made about who is who and who isn’t here everybody knows that the criminal heart lies beneath down underneath

V DEATH

our vicino di terra our land neighbor is what we say where I come from to describe people whose farmland is next door to your farmland and our vicino di terra had a small plot of land next to my father’s land and at the same time he worked as a hired hand sometimes he did work for my father and the son of this land neighbor of ours during the period when the clan was at its most powerful worked as a driver for the Bardellinos and when he turned twenty-one they gave him a turbocharged automobile that cost a lot of money at the time but this kid never did anything serious he just drove some people around and ran some errands for them but then when people started getting murdered and the clan war and the Bardellinos were eliminated this land neighbor of ours started complaining that his son couldn’t leave the house anymore because he was afraid he said that his son had never done anything wrong that he didn’t even know those people but some time before that he had boasted in our presence on more than one occasion that they had given his son a gift of a turbocharged automobile and so forth