Love is Just a Moment Read Online Free PDF Page A

ignoring her plea and watching the men as if there were nothing else in the world but he and them. “He is a vicious, cruel man whose penchant for violence is only matched by his own brute stupidity. The bald one across from him is Frankie Falcone, an American, though he has lived here for as long as my own life. But it is the one in the middle who I have come here to face. That is Libano, the man who killed my father.”
    Helplessly, Rebecca looked back at the gangster who had so consumed Piero’s mind for more than half of his life. “Libano” wore a thick dark beard around his sagging jowls and his lank, slicked back hair spilled down greasily all the way to his shoulders. Rebecca did not believe true evil existed in the world, but if she did she would be sure that she was looking at it right now. Everything about the man seemed hateful, angry and cruel.
    “Please leave Rebecca,” Piero said, a slight quaver entering his low, determined voice. “please go now, before it is too late.”
    “No,” she said, “not unless you come with me when I do.”
    Piero’s shoulders fell with defeat, but it was not a defeat to her wishes. It was clear that he would not be stopped and if it pained him so much to have Rebecca there, perhaps he had decided that there could be no other way.
    “Very well,” he said, “if you must see me when I act—if you must see what my destiny demands of me—then I will make sure at least that you know why it has to be so.”
    He focused his attention back on her and as the anger went out of his eyes it seemed to leave a great, painful exhaustion in its wake. The power of his hatred for the men who had wronged him was so overwhelming that it was like it was draining him of his very soul, like his young, lithe twenty-two-year-old-frame was simply not strong enough a canticle to contain such powerful negative emotion.
    “Like I told you earlier,” he said, “my father was a simple farmer—an honest man who made his living through honest means—he did not have greed or desire for anything more than what he already had, a wife who loved him, a son who adored him, and the humble means to provide a good living for them both. A man like that inspires nothing but fear and hatred in such a killer as Libano, because he knows there is nothing he can do to coerce or control him.
    “First they came with offers of money. A gangster from the city, a cousin of Libano’s, needed somewhere to hide from the police after a botched kidnapping in Rome, and since this area is under Libano’s control they decided to send him here. My father politely refused. I remember how he treated the visitors with such calm respect before he ushered my mother to take me back inside, I remember the frightened wonder I felt to see him so calm in the face of what was, even to me, such obvious menace and evil.
    “Then they returned with threats, but still my father refused them with the same polite fairness. I am a simple man of simple means, he said, I do not want anything of your world and ask only that you leave me to be in my own. Imagine how such a reasonable invocation could be its own death warrant for the man who spoke it, then you will understand the true nature of these animals who call themselves men.
    “They could have sent their fugitive to any other farm on the island and indeed that is what they eventually did. But that was not enough. My father had offended them, first by refusing the allure of their wealth, and second by dismissing the strength of their threats. To such men that is an offense worth killing for, and why not? To men like Libano other human beings have no more value than cattle or sheep.
    “I cannot express to you the pain, the disbelief, the agony I felt when an old neighbor came to the house in tears to tell us that my father had been gunned down in the village—this village—where he had come to deliver wool to the market. They tried to keep me sheltered from the truth but I knew from