after the acute national embarrassment of the Assumption Day massacre, six Calabrians cut down by other Calabrians in the heart of Germany, they could do no less.

Nobody imagined it would do any good or make any difference, but the motions had to be gone through, the charades of law and order and the functioning state enacted.

It will do no good because the protagonists of the feud of San Luca are not in a hurry. They know how to wait, and they are willing to wait for ages. The feud began in 1991; until Duisburg, it had taken nine lives in 16 years, barely one killing every two years.

The police and the machinery of justice are even more ponderous and irrelevant here than in the rest of Italy. The man the killers of Duisburg were after was a 25-year-old gang member called Marco Marmo.

They wanted to get him because they believed he had killed the last victim of the feud, Maria Strangio, 33, shot dead on her doorstep last Christmas. The police also suspected him, but in eight months of sleuthing they had only got as far as putting him on the list of investigatees. No arrest, no charges, just the advice that at some point they might have to ask him some questions. A couple of days before he and his five friends were shot dead, the police in San Luca warned him that they had reason to believe another clan was aiming to get him.

In the badlands of southern Italy, the police are bystanders to the mafia wars . . . at best. They count the bodies, make chalk marks at the crime scene, write their reports.

Meanwhile the gangs bide their time. Maria Strangio was murdered on Christmas Eve. There was a sort of brutally childish, sadistic calculation in the choice of date: that way it will always be remembered as "La Strage di Natale", the Christmas Massacre . . . and the family's holiday will be ruined into the bargain.

Their enemies paid them back in kind on Assumption Day, Ferr'agosto, the biggest holiday of the Italian summer: another holiday sluiced in blood, another feast day six families will never again be able to mark without bitter memories.

The mafia are tremendously good at waiting: no politician or magistrate or policeman can outlast them.

That is what explains the uncanny sullen mood in the gangster-haunted villages and towns of southern Italy: a population, "the living dead" as someone in San Luca said last week, waiting and waiting in the grim knowledge that evil will arrive.

"The Casalesi come late, but they never forget, " the only turncoat ever to grass on the Camorra, the mafia of Naples, told his questioners. He was explaining why 11 years had elapsed between his boss passing sentence of death on one particular enemy, and the sentence being carried out.

The waiting, the capacity to wait, is in itself a way of twisting the knife.

Italy's best-selling writer on the Camorra, Roberto Saviano, is going through it now. The author of Gomorrah, the first book to tell the story of the Naples gangs from the inside, has been sentenced to death by the Mob for spilling their secrets . The state has given him bodyguards and has banned him from returning to Naples, because it's just too dangerous. But Saviano knows that a sudden blitz on a busy Naples street with his bodyguards all around him is the least likely thing to happen.

Like the boss of the Casalesi, his enemies will bide their time until the state informs him that funds for this level of protection are no longer available, or that their information is that the threat has gone away.

Saviano, unable to return home, forced to move house all the time, is in limbo, which is where the mafia sends you before they kill you, sometimes for many years.

There is a mood of bitter chagrin in Italy in the wake of the Duisburg killings. It makes it very much worse that it happened abroad.