XIV THE WAR

while we’re on the subject of fake IDs one evening I was working as usual behind the counter of the Bar Nazionale an ideal vantage point for all the murders that happen in our town I’m minding my business and doing my job when a young man comes into the café a city constable named Antonio Diana there are a lot of people in our town whose last name is Diana even thought they aren’t all related so he walks into the café where on the right is the bar and on the left is the computer where we sell tickets for the soccer lottery this city constable Diana stayed for half an hour chatting with the owner of the bar then he left and started up the street toward the town hall it was late afternoon it was almost dark and a car pulls up next to him and someone asks him the time he looks down at his watch and a shotgun blasts right into his face which was unrecognizable when they found him meanwhile everyone hears the shots and sees the uproar and they all turn tail and run I lock myself into the bathroom and a little kid who spends his afternoons in the café playing video games hides in a utility closet under the stairs where we store empty bottles and things of that sort and he wouldn’t come out for two hours we tried to convince him to come out but he refused he was afraid finally his older brother arrived and told him I’m here you can come out it’s all over

anyway so when this constable Diana was murdered nobody could come up with a motive there were rumors that it was a warning to anyone thinking of causing trouble since he was a good looking man in his twenties and people said that he had a secret relationship with a married woman and perhaps the husband wanted to let it be known that this was no way to behave oddly enough though a short while after that came the news that an airplane on its way to Spain had crashed some people hinted that there had been a bomb on board apparently among the victims was a traveler whose body was unidentified but who was carrying an identity card with the name of this constable Diana a counterfeit identity document and the explanation would be that they killed him to keep him from talking to keep him from providing information about that counterfeit document in his name

in the meantime there was a strange atmosphere in town the various members of the Bardellino family would no longer leave their homes they had barricaded themselves in their high security bunkers nobody dared to get near those houses there was the sense of a truce in the air and one night a few weeks later the town was treated to the spectacle of a caravan of cars it was Ernesto and his brothers and everyone in their families abandoned by all their friends and former allies leaving the town and their homes for good they were moving to Formia which was one of their old agricultural power centers and with this gesture they were signifying that they were retiring from the organization for good abandoning everything and in exchange they wanted to be left in peace to enjoy in any case the considerable wealth they had set aside not to be bothered again and one after another the bosses of the various villages and towns of the region accepted the situation and allied themselves with the victor Mario Iovine