The Sicilian Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    The other man was equally surprising but for a different reason. At first glance, Michael flinched. The man was so small that he could be taken for a dwarf but had such dignified bearing that Michael sensed