The Sicilian (3 page)

At intervals along the road were holy shrines, padlocked wooden boxes that held statues of the Virgin Mary or some particular favored saint. At one of these shrines, Michael saw a woman on her knees praying, her husband sitting in their donkey-drawn cart guzzling a bottle of wine. The donkey’s head drooped like a martyr’s.

Stefan Andolini reached over to caress Michael’s shoulder and said, “It does my heart good to see you, my dear cousin. Did you know that the Guilianos are related to us?”

Michael was sure this was a lie; there was something in that foxily red smile. “No,” he said. “I only knew the parents worked for my father in America.”

“As I did,” Andolini said. “We helped build your father’s house on Long Island. Old Guiliano was a fine bricklayer, and though your father offered him a place in the olive oil business, he stuck to his trade. He worked like a Negro for eighteen years and saved like a Jew. Then he came back to Sicily to live like an Englishman. But the war and Mussolini made their lire worthless and now he owns only his house and a small piece of land to farm. He curses the day he left America. They thought their little boy would grow up a prince and now he is a bandit.”

The Fiat had stirred up a cloud of dust; alongside the road growths of prickly pears and bamboo had a ghostly appearance, the pears in their clusters seeming to form human hands. In the valleys they could see the olive groves and grapevines. Suddenly Andolini said, “Turi was conceived in America.”

He saw Michael’s questioning glance. “Yes, he was conceived in America but born in Sicily. A few months’ wait and Turi would be an American citizen.” He paused for a moment. “Turi always talks about that. Do you really think you can help him escape?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “After lunch with the Inspector and Don Croce, I don’t know what anything means. Do they want me to help? My father said Don Croce would do so. He never mentioned the Inspector.”

Andolini brushed back his thinning hair. Unconsciously his foot pressed down on the gas pedal and the Fiat scooted forward. “Guiliano and Don Croce are enemies now,” he said. “But we have made plans without Don Croce. Turi and his parents count on you. They know your father has never been false to a friend.”

Michael said, “And whose side are you on?”

Andolini sighed. “I fight for Guiliano,” he said. “We have been comrades for the last five years and before that he spared my life. But I live in Sicily and so cannot defy Don Croce to his face. I walk a tightrope between the two, but I will never betray Guiliano.”

Michael thought, What the hell was the man saying? Why couldn’t he get a straight answer from any of them? Because this was Sicily, he thought. Sicilians had a horror of truth. Tyrants and Inquisitors had tortured them for the truth over thousands of years. The government in Rome with its legal forms demanded the truth. The priest in the confessional box commanded the truth under pain of everlasting hell. But truth was a source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?

He would have to find his own way, Michael thought, or perhaps abandon the mission and hurry home. He was on dangerous ground here, there was obviously some sort of vendetta between Guiliano and Don Croce and to be caught in the vortex of a Sicilian vendetta was suicidal. For the Sicilian believes that vengeance is the only true justice, and that it is always merciless. On this Catholic island, statues of a weeping Jesus in every home, Christian forgiveness was a contemptible refuge of the coward.

“Why did Guiliano and Don Croce become enemies?” Michael asked.

“Because of the tragedy at the Portella della Ginestra,” Andolini said. “Two years ago. After that it was never the same. Guiliano blamed Don Croce.”

Suddenly the car seemed to drop almost vertically, the road was descending out of the mountains into a valley. They passed the ruins of a Norman castle, built to terrorize the countryside nine hundred years ago and now crawling with harmless lizards and a few stray goats. Down below, Michael could see the town of Montelepre.

It was buried deep in the closely surrounding mountains as if it were a bucket hanging in the bottom of a well. It formed a perfect circle, there were no outlying houses, and the late afternoon sun bathed the stones of its walls with dark red fire. Now the Fiat was coasting down a narrow twisting street and Andolini braked it to a stop where a roadblock manned by a platoon of
carabinieri
barred their way. One motioned with his rifle for them to get out of the car.

Michael watched Andolini show his documents to the police. He saw the special red-bordered pass that he knew could only be issued by the Minister of Justice in Rome. Michael had one himself which he had been instructed to show only as a last resort. How did a man like Andolini get such a powerful document?

Then they were back in the car and rolling through the narrow streets of Montelepre, so narrow that if a car came from the opposite direction they could not pass each other. The houses all had elegant balconies and were painted different colors. Many were blue, a few less were white and there were some painted pink. A very few were yellow. At this time of the day the women were inside cooking dinner for their husbands. But no children were in the streets. Instead, each corner was patrolled by a pair of
carabinieri
. Montelepre looked like an occupied town under martial law. Only a few old men looked down from their balconies with faces of stone.

The Fiat stopped in front of a row of attached houses, one of which was painted a bright blue and had a gate in which the grillwork formed the letter “G.” The gate was opened by a small wiry man of about sixty who wore an American suit, dark and striped, a white shirt and a black tie. This was Guiliano’s father. He gave Andolini a quick but affectionate embrace. He patted Michael on the shoulder almost gratefully as he ushered them into the house.

Guiliano’s father had the face of a man suffering the awaited death of a loved one terminally ill. It was obvious he was controlling his emotions very strictly, but his hand went up to his face as if to force his features to keep their shape. His body was rigid, moving stiffly, yet wavering slightly.

They entered a large sitting room, luxurious for a Sicilian home in this small town. Dominating the room was a huge enlargement of a photograph, too fuzzy to be recognizable, framed in oval cream-colored wood. Michael knew immediately this must be Salvatore Guiliano. Beneath, on a small round black table, was a votive light. On another table was a framed picture defined more clearly. Father, mother and son stood against a red curtain, the son with his arm possessively around his mother. Salvatore Guiliano looked directly into the camera, as if challenging it. The face was extraordinarily handsome, like that of a Grecian statue, the features a little heavy as though wrought in marble, the lips full and sensual, the eyes oval with half-closed lids set wide apart. It was the face of a man without self-doubt, determined to impose himself upon the world. But what no one had prepared Michael for was the good-humored sweetness of that handsome face.

There were other pictures of him with his sisters and their husbands, but these were almost hidden on shadowy corner tables.

Guiliano’s father led them into the kitchen. Guiliano’s mother turned from the cooking stove to greet them. Maria Lombardo Guiliano looked much older than the photograph of her in the other room, indeed looked like some other woman. Her polite smile was like a rictus on the bone-set exhaustion of her face, her skin chapped and rough. Her hair was long and full over her shoulders but streaked with heavy ropes of gray. What was startling was her eyes. They were almost black with an impersonal hatred of this world that was crushing her and her son.

She ignored her husband and Stefan Andolini, she spoke directly to Michael. “Have you come to help my son or not?” The other two men looked embarrassed at the rudeness of her question, but Michael smiled at her gravely.

“Yes, I am with you.”

Some of the tension went out of her, and she bowed her head into her hands as if she had expected a blow. Andolini said to her in a soothing voice, “Father Benjamino asked to come, I told him you did not wish it.”

Maria Lombardo raised her head and Michael marveled at how her face showed every emotion she felt. The scorn, the hatred, the fear, the irony of her words matching the flinty smile, the grimaces she could not repress. “Oh, Father Benjamino has a good heart, without a doubt,” she said. “And with that good heart of his he is like the plague, he brings death to an entire village. He is like the sisal plant—brush against him and you will bleed. And he brings the secrets of the confessional to his brother, he sells the souls in his keeping to the devil.”

Guiliano’s father said with quiet reasonableness, as if he were trying to quiet a madman, “Don Croce is our friend. He had us released from prison.”

Guiliano’s mother burst out furiously, “Ah, Don Croce, ‘The Good Soul,’ how kind he is always. But let me tell you, Don Croce is a serpent. He aims a gun forward and slaughters his friend by his side. He and our son were going to rule Sicily together, and now Turi is hiding alone in the mountains and ‘The Good Soul’ is free as air in Palermo with his whores. Don Croce has only to whistle and Rome licks his feet. And yet he has committed more crimes than our Turi. He is evil and our son is good. Ah, if I were a man like you I would kill Don Croce. I would put ‘The Good Soul’ to rest.” She made a gesture of disgust. “You men understand nothing.”

Guiliano’s father said impatiently, “I understand our guest must be on the road in a few hours and that he must eat something before we can talk.”

Guiliano’s mother suddenly became quite different. She was solicitous. “Poor man, you’ve traveled all day to see us, you had to listen to Don Croce’s lies and my ravings. Where do you go?”

“I must be in Trapani by morning,” Michael said. “I stay with friends of my father until your son comes to me.”

There was a stillness in the room. He sensed they all knew his history. They saw the wound he had lived with for two years, the caved-in side of his face. Guiliano’s mother came to him and gave him a quick embrace.

“Have a glass of wine,” she said. “Then you go for a walk through the town. Food will be waiting on the table within the hour. And by that time Turi’s friends will have arrived and we can talk sensibly.”

Andolini and Guiliano’s father put Michael between them and strolled down the narrow, cobbled streets of Montelepre, the stones gleaming black now that the sun had fallen out of the sky. In the hazy blue air before twilight, only the figures of the National Police, the
carabinieri
, moved around them. At every intersection, thin snakelike alleyways ran like venom off the Via Bella. The town seemed deserted.

“This was once a lively town,” Guiliano’s father said. “Always, always very poor, like all of Sicily, a lot of misery, but it was alive. Now more than seven hundred of our citizens are in jail, arrested for conspiracy with my son. They are innocent, most of them, but the government arrests them to frighten the others, to make them inform against my Turi. There are over two thousand National Police around this town and other thousands hunt Turi in the mountains. And so people no longer eat their dinner out of doors, their children can no longer play in the street. The police are such cowards they fire their guns if a rabbit runs across the road. There is a curfew after dark, and if a woman of the town wants to visit a neighbor and is caught they offer her indignities and insults. The men they cart off to torture in their Palermo dungeons.” He sighed. “Such things could never happen in America. I curse the day I left.”

Stefan Andolini made them pause as he lit a small cigar. Puffing, he said with a smile, “Tell the truth, all Sicilians prefer smelling the shit of their villages to the best perfumes in Paris. What am I doing here? I could have escaped to Brazil like some others. Ah, we love where we are born, we Sicilians, but Sicily does not love us.”

Guiliano’s father shrugged. “I was a fool to come back. If I had only waited a few more months my Turi would have been an American by law. But the air of that country must have seeped into his mother’s womb.” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Why did my son always concern himself with the troubles of other people, even those not related by blood? He always had such grand ideas, he always talked of justice. A true Sicilian talks of bread.”

As they walked down the Via Bella, Michael saw that the town was built ideally for ambush and guerrilla warfare. The streets were so narrow that only one motor vehicle could pass through, and many were only wide enough for the small carts and donkeys Sicilians still used for the transport of goods. A few men could hold back any invading force and then escape to the white limestone mountains that encircled the town.

They descended into the central square. Andolini pointed to the small church that dominated it and said, “It was in this church that Turi hid when the National Police tried to capture him that very first time. Since then, he has been a ghost.” The three men watched the church door as if Salvatore Guiliano might appear before them.

The sun dropped behind the mountains, and they returned to the house just before curfew. Two strange men were waiting inside for them, strangers only to Michael, for they embraced Guiliano’s father and shook Stefan Andolini’s hand.

One was a slim young man with extremely sallow skin and huge dark feverish eyes. He had a dandyish mustache and an almost feminine prettiness, but he was in no way effeminate looking. He had the air of proud cruelty that comes to a man with a will to command at any cost.

When he was introduced as Gaspare Pisciotta, Michael was astonished. Pisciotta was Turi Guiliano’s second in command, his cousin and his dearest friend. Next to Guiliano, he was the most wanted man in Sicily, with a price of five million lire on his head. From the legends Michael had heard, the name Gaspare Pisciotta conjured up a more dangerous and evil-looking man. And yet here he stood, so slender and with the feverish flush of the consumptive on his face. Here in Montelepre surrounded by two thousand of Rome’s military police.