the man is corpulent and he seems intimidated he wears blue jeans a Rolex and a safari jacket he walks turned to one side ill at ease flanked by two policemen who hold his arms low his wrists handcuffed there is actually no need for that Sandokan doesn’t even try to ward off the television cameras that start humming the instant he appears he looks at the world through a pair of outsized glasses with transparent frames he had lots of them at home one of his hobbies along with painting as if he wanted to impress clearly in his mind a scene or certain faces if you met him walking down the street you’d take him for a farmer a peasant and instead as they say at the DIA he had ambitions to be an intellectual a boss who painted the bunker where he was arrested was filled with signed paintings there was a self portrait a clean face shirt and tie and there was a portrait of Napoleon gazing out at a sunset a sort of foreshadowing there were books about Cézanne van Gogh and Titian an entire course on painting a boss with a passion for the internet in the bunker there were even a couple of computers and hookups for browsing the web

the man who defied the Italian state who fathered two children during his five years on the run from the law the man who met personally with statesmen and captains of industry dictating the rules and demanding bribes for the construction of highways gigantic bridge projects public works the man who murdered his former godfather without a moment’s hesitation the man whose chosen sobriquet was Sandokan for his personal ferocity his savagery like his namesake the Tiger of Mompracem and like the Tiger of Mompracem he had long raven black hair and a black beard the same man though now he is sixty-five pounds heavier and without the beard that evoked the author of Sandokan was afraid when after thirteen hours of patient searching the police finally caught him in his gold plated hideout filled with books and paintings that he had painted his favorite subjects were Mussolini Napoleon and of course himself time can be cruel there is nothing in the man the police handcuffed except for the sheer bulk of the physique to remind us of his former resemblance to the actor Kabir Bedi the resemblance that won him the monicker Sandokan a perfect name with which to construct a legend nothing that suggests he was the head of an empire worth five trillion lire five billion dollars that was the family’s estimated volume of business

II WELCOME TO …

there is a little bridge here that runs between our town and a neighboring town and halfway across the bridge is a sign that says welcome to but you can’t read the name of our town because it’s been blotted out by a bunch of black holes and then when you reach the end of the bridge if you keep going straight you see the town which is basically all right there you can take it all in at a glance over here on this side and over there on that side there’s streets and alleys and houses stacked one practically on top of another everywhere you look but the whole town is clustered around this main street that runs through the whole town and then turns into this main corso called Corso Umberto and down at the far end of Corso Umberto there’s another short piece of steep uphill street and then the road runs out of town over here a sign says you’re leaving town and then the curving road hooks up with the county road that runs toward Casale Casale’s right here then the road runs on from there it runs from Villa Literno all the way to Aversa and runs around outside all the local towns it doesn’t run through them it skirts around them and a long time ago on the county road there was a trolley that ran all along this stretch