Neil Griffiths |
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Neil Griffiths works in television and has previously written for Radio 4. His first novel, Betrayal in Naples, published by Penguin, won the 2004 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. His latest novel Saving Caravaggio, is also published by Penguin. He lives in London.
Meeting the Real Mafia
You don’t get to meet the real mafia. They don’t do interviews. They won’t pop down to a café for a chat. They certainly don’t do breakfast, despite considering themselves businessmen. Only the mafia meet the mafia, and of course, the odd politician. These days dying by the hands of the mafia means a bomb, so you don’t even get to meet them that way. I guess you might meet them inadvertently, in a restaurant in Palermo or Naples, without knowing it, but that isn’t really meeting them, is it?
Now you can see them; that’s easy. The court rooms of southern Italy are full of the fellows. Researching my first novel Betrayal in Naples I spent days attending mafia trials watching them mooch about the cage. Seeing them is easy, and safe. Bullet-proof glass divides the gallery and the courtroom, the police lining the walls are armed, you have to pass through metal detectors checking for bombs. It’s something fun to do if you’re ever in Naples or Palermo.
But for my second novel Saving Caravaggio I felt I needed to get closer. To meet a member of the mafia. And not just a soldier; someone with real authority. Amongst other things my new novel is about power, charisma, magnetism, and how that plays out in different worlds – the micro world of marriage, the art world, organized crime. I don’t really have an interest in gangsters per se; my interest is in people – people who live extreme lives and what makes them act in extreme ways. Because whether we know it or not every day we make the decision not to act in extreme ways. The decision to go to work is always taken against an option of not going to work and, say, flying to Naples to see what life has to offer there instead (my first novel).
In the new novel, Daniel, an art detective, decides to ditch the operation he’s been assigned to and go in search of the world’s most famous stolen painting, Caravaggio’s Nativity, torn out of its frame in a Palermo chapel by the mafia in the 60s. (A true story.) A painting that has become mythologized over the last thirty years, supposedly moving from clan to clan as a down payment for drug deals, political assassinations. To get the painting back Daniel will eventually have to face down a senior mafioso.
I’m not a great believer in detailed research. Novels are works of the imagination. You need to know the basic stuff, but after that the imagination should be free to do its work. However, there are moments when you realize your imagination isn’t anchored anywhere and it will drift beyond what is real, or what might be described as the imaginative-real. I asked myself, could I credibly describe the all-important face-off between Daniel and Lomazzo without ever having experienced anything like it? I had my doubts.
I started Saving Caravaggio a month before the birth of my twins. I think your sense of mortality changes when you have children. Mine certainly did. I’ve never been particularly intrepid, but now I weigh up any action with a simple question: will doing this thing deprive my children of a father? In this instance this thing being meeting a high-ranking mafioso. I was realistic. My chances of this happening were slim and research had told me that these days the mafia don’t kill people if they can help it. They like to kill each other, and occasionally a journalist or politician, but they don’t like civilian deaths – the political fall-out gets in the way of business.
I have contacts in Naples. I cannot mention names because I might put them in danger. Well, not actual danger, but their livelihoods might be at risk. This is how the mafia works these days: they don’t kill you - they isolate you. Which makes it easier for them to kill you if you persist in whatever it is you’re doing that has made them isolate you in the first place.
I love Naples. I’m not sure what I think about Neapolitans, however. A complex people, they are relaxed, superstitious, proud, fun, open-minded, hospitable. Like their city they are half bright sunlight, half deep shadow. Both aspects are attractive, fascinating, and especially in one person, but these extremes are for novels, not for life.
I wasn’t told how the meeting was going to be set up, who was making what calls, what was being said, how long it was all going to take. I was in Naples three days before I heard anything. Eventually I was told there was someone who’d read an article about my first novel in La Repubblica and might be willing to meet me. But he was being unclear as to when, where and for how long. I explained I only had a week. But the mafia can’t be nagged. At one point I was told to write down the questions I might want to ask him. I said I didn’t have any questions; I wasn’t a journalist; I just wanted to meet him. This seemed to make an impression. Everything went silent. My contacts said they were being told he wasn’t in the country, even that he was dead. Everyone was losing interest. I was missing the twins terribly (I had caught up on my sleep). I asked myself: do I really need to meet this guy? What did my imagination think? I tried to write the scene – I was adrift. What is the dynamic between a man who wants something desperately, to the point he will risk his life, and a man who has the power to give him what he wants, whilst also taking his life if he chooses? I gave up writing the scene and went to dinner. My last night.
My favourite restaurant in Naples is a small family run place – father-in-law (chef), two son-in-laws (waiters) – just off Spaccanapoli, on the Spanish Quarter of Via Roma. It was getting late, almost midnight. I’d eaten well, drunk a jug of house wine, downed two complimentary glasses of limoncello. The talk was football, the Champions’ League. I was sitting back from the table, legs out, ankles crossed; if I hadn’t quit smoking I’d have been smoking and enjoying my cigarette with that precise pleasure only smoking gives you after eating and drinking well in a restaurant where you know the staff just well enough to linger beyond closing time. I’d resigned myself to a failed trip.
Was he recognized by those around me? No, they said later. Then why did the atmosphere change within seconds of him entering? He was in his fifties. Small. Average height for Neapolitan. Wearing a light brown suit, white shirt, dark tie. He was balding a little at the front. His hair was combed back, exposing its thinness. His skin was weather-worn dark. Alone, he had the presence of three men. Men with power, money, influence, authority, status. Men who do not need to be showy to alter the atmosphere and dynamics of any room. He was handsome because of this quality. His face itself lacked what goes for handsome in lesser men.
He knew which of us was me, or at least he only looked at me as he walked in. The rest of the room didn’t exist. I stood, brushing crumbs from my lap, straightening up my clothes, my posture – shaking my body free of its relaxation. He stopped before me. My eyes shunted from side to side; I wondered whether eye contact might contravene some ancient law, like not showing your back to a king.
He smiled. No, not quite a smile – it was permission to be in his presence. I smiled back. He nodded and offered me his hand. I took it. ‘You wanted to meet me?’ I was silent; nodding seemed enough. His stare invited me to look at him, super-directly you might say – to stare back. This silent examination lasted a few seconds, no more. Then he was gone.
He didn’t actually disappear. But his departure felt instant. Magical. It is a trick only the powerful can perform. On entering alone, walking directly up to me, his power was being exerted. He commanded us to understand who he was and what it meant to be him. Then on leaving he withdrew that power, relieving us of that imperative. And it was this withdrawal that was instant, this withdrawal which signalled his disappearance. The man himself left by the door.
This meeting is not described in my novel. But I do think there are a number of scenes, and especially the final confrontation between Daniel and Lomazzo, which couldn’t have been written without that thirty-second face-to-face. There was a moment between myself and Don M------- that was beyond my imagination and needed to be experienced. I don’t regard it as research. Research informs a novel. An encounter like this one changes the author.
