Mafia country

There was an area of small restaurants to the north and west of where I rented the aforementioned double room in the apartment of a civil servant and his family in downtown Palermo. They were mostly of the same design all along the street –  a few tables on the pavement if there was enough room, a small bar inside the door where one could wait for a table to become free, and a narrow room for the guests. Most had a double row of small tables along each wall. At the far end there would be a counter and a swing door to the kitchen.

On our first pay-day my roommate and I picked one of those restaurants to celebrate our first non-cafeteria meal in the city. I have forgotten what we ate and, sadly, the name of my roommate. What I do remember, though, is him showing me a newspaper front page a couple of days later. There was a large photograph of a restaurant entrance and a neon sign above the door with the name of the restaurant, the same one we had had that meal in. The day after two men had come on a Lambretta scooter, parked it with the engine left running, entered and shot dead two men at point blank range, gone out and sped off on the scooter. Nobody had seen what they looked like.

We did not go there again. In fact, I avoided the area.

We did not discuss the incident much, mostly due to the fact that his Italian was only slightly better than mine in the beginning and he knew only Turkish apart from that. I think he told me that the word for bread is “ekmek” in Turkish. Also, our working hours were not the same so he could not join our little group of exchange students who would meet at the beach after work at three o’clock in the afternoon most days. They had nice working hours in the summer in Palermo.

A la prossima volta

Karl