The Sicilian

CHAPTER 2

In September of 1943 Hector Adonis was a Professor of History and Literature at the University of Palermo. His extremely short stature caused his colleagues to treat him with less respect than his talents deserved. But this was foreordained in the Sicilian culture, which commonly and brutally based nicknames on physical shortcomings. The one person who knew his true value was the President of the University.

In this September of 1943, Hector Adonis' life was about to change. For southern Italy, the war was over. The American Army had already conquered Sicily and gone on to the mainland. Fascism was dead, Italy was reborn; for the first time in fourteen centuries, the island of Sicily had no real master. But Hector Adonis, knowing the ironies of history, had no great hopes. The Mafia had already begun to usurp the rule of law in Sicily. Their cancerous power would be as deadly as that of any corporate state. From his office window he looked down on the grounds of the University, at the few buildings that could be called a campus.

There was no need for dormitories, there was no college life as known in England and America. Here most students studied at home and consulted with their professors at stated intervals. The professors gave lectures which students could ignore with impunity. They needed only to take their exams. It was a system that Hector Adonis thought disgraceful in general and stupid in particular as it affected Sicilians, who, he thought, required a pedagogical discipline even more severe than students in other countries.

Watching from his cathedral-like window he could see the seasonal influx of Mafia chiefs from all the provinces of Sicily, come to make their lobbying calls on the professors of the University. Under Fascist rule, these Mafia chiefs had been more circumspect, more humble, but now under the beneficent rule of American-restored democracy, they had risen like worms struggling through rain-broken earth and resumed their old ways. They were no longer humble.

The Mafia chiefs, the Friends of the Friends, heads of small local clans in the many villages of Sicily, came in holiday finery to plead the cause of students who were relatives or sons of wealthy landowners, or sons of friends, who were failing in their courses at the University, who would not get degrees unless some firm action was taken. And these degrees were of the utmost importance. How else would families get rid of sons who had no ambition, no talent, no intelligence? Parents would have to support sons the rest of their lives. But with degrees, slips of parchment from the University, these same rascals could become teachers, doctors, members of Parliament, or if worse came to worst, minor administrative functionaries of the state.

Hector Adonis shrugged; history consoled him. His beloved British, in their greatest days of Empire, had entrusted their armies to equally incompetent sons of the rich, whose parents bought them commissions in the army and the commands of great ships. Still the Empire had prospered. True these commanders had led their men to unnecessary slaughters, yet it must be said that the commanders had died with their men, bravery had been an imperative of their class. And that dying had at least solved the problem of incompetent and feckless men becoming a burden to the state. Italians were not so chivalrous or so coldly practical. They loved their children, saved them from personal disasters and let the state look after itself.

From his window, Hector Adonis could spot at least three local Mafia chiefs wandering around looking for their victims. They wore cloth caps and leather boots and carried over their arms heavy velvet jackets, for the weather was still warm. They carried baskets of fruit, bamboo-jacketed bottles of home-grown wine to give as gifts. Not bribes but courteous antidotes for the terror that would rise in the breasts of the professors at the sight of them. For most of the professors were natives of Sicily and understood that the requests could never be refused.

One of the Mafia chiefs, in dress so countrified he could have stepped onto the stage of Cavalleria Rusticana, was entering the building and ascending the stairs. Hector Adonis prepared, with sardonic pleasure, to play the familiar comedy to come.

Adonis knew the man. His name was Buccilla and he owned a farm and sheep in a town called Partinico, not far from Montelepre. They shook hands and Buccilla handed him the basket he was carrying.

"We have so much fruit dropping to the ground and rotting that I thought, I'll carry some to the Professor," Buccilla said. He was a short but broad man, his body powerful from a lifetime of hard work. Adonis knew he had a reputation for honesty, that he was a modest man though he could have turned his power into riches. He was a throwback to the old Mafia chiefs who fought not for riches but for respect and honor.

Adonis smiled as he accepted the fruit. What peasant in Sicily ever let anything go to waste? There were a hundred children for each olive that fell to the ground, and these children were like locusts.

Buccilla sighed. He was affable, but Adonis knew this affability could turn to menace in the fraction of a second. So he flashed a sympathetic smile as Buccilla said, "What a nuisance life is. I have work to do on my land and yet when my neighbor asked me to do this little favor, how could I refuse? My father knew his father, my grandfather his grandfather. And it is my nature, perhaps my misfortune that I will do anything a friend asks me to do. After all, are we not Christians together?"

Hector Adonis said smoothly, "We Sicilians are all the same. We are too generous. That is why the northerners in Rome take such a shameful advantage of us."

Buccilla stared at him shrewdly. There would be no trouble here. And hadn't he heard somewhere that this professor was one of the Friends? Certainly he did not seem frightened. And if he was a Friend of the Friends, why had not he, Buccilla, known this fact? But there were many different levels in the Friends. In any event, here was a man who understood the world he lived in.

"I have come to ask you a favor," Buccilla said. "As one Sicilian to another. My neighbor's son failed at the University this year. You failed him. So my neighbor claims. But when I heard your name I said to him, 'What! Signor Adonis? Why, that man has the best heart in the world. He could never do such an unkindness if he knew all the facts. Never.' And so they begged me with tears to tell you the whole story. And to ask with the utmost humbleness to change his grade so that he can go into the world to earn his bread."

Hector Adonis was not deceived by this exquisite politeness. Again it was like the English he so much admired, those people who could be so subtly rude that you basked in their insults for days before you realized they had mortally wounded you. A figure of speech in regard to the English, but with Signor Buccilla, his request, if denied, would be followed by the blast of a lupara on some dark night. Hector Adonis politely nibbled on the olives and berries in the basket. "Ah, we can't let a young man starve in this terrible world," he said. "What is the fellow's name?" And when Buccilla told him, he took up a ledger from the bottom of his desk. He leafed through it, though of course he knew the name well.

The failed student was a lout, an oaf, a lummox; more a brute than the sheep on Buccilla's farm. He was a lazy womanizer, a shiftless braggart, a hopeless illiterate who did not know the difference between the Iliad and Verga. Despite all this, Hector Adonis smiled sweetly at Buccilla and in a tone of the utmost surprise said, "Ah, he had a little trouble with one of his examinations. But it is easily put to order. Have him come see me and I will prepare him in these very rooms and then give him an extra examination. He will not fail again."

They shook hands, and the man left. Another friend made, Hector thought. What did it signify that all these young good-for-nothings got University degrees they did not earn or deserve? In the Italy of 1943 they could use them to wipe their pampered asses and decline into positions of mediocrity.

The ringing phone broke his train of thought and brought a different irritation. There was a short ring, then a pause before three curler rings. The woman at the switchboard was gossiping with someone and flipped her tab between the pauses in her own conversation. This exasperated him so that he shouted, "Pronto" into the phone more rudely than was seemly.

And unfortunately it was the President of the University calling. But the President, a notorious stickler for professional courtesy, obviously had more important things on his mind than rudeness. His voice was quivering with fear, almost tearful in its supplication. "My dear Professor Adonis," he said, "could I trouble you to come to my office? The University has a grave problem that only you may be able to resolve. It is of the utmost importance. Believe me, my dear Professor, you will have my gratitude."

This obsequiousness made Hector Adonis nervous. What did the idiot expect of him? To jump over the Cathedral of Palermo? The President would be better qualified, Adonis thought bitterly, he was at least six feet. Let him jump and not ask a subordinate with the shortest legs in Sicily to do his job for him. This image put Adonis into a good humor again. So he asked mildly, "Perhaps you could give me a hint. Then on my way I might prepare myself."

The President's voice sank to a whisper. "The estimable Don Croce has honored us with a visit. His nephew is a medical student, and his professor suggested he retire gracefully from the program. Don Croce has come to beg us in the most courteous way possible to reconsider. However, the professor in the Medical College insists that the young man resign."

"Who is the fool?" Hector Adonis asked.

"Young Doctor Nattore," the President said. "An estimable member of the faculty but as yet a little unworldly."

"I shall be in your office within five minutes," Hector Adonis said.

As he hurried across the open ground to the main building, Hector Adonis pondered what course of action to take. The difficulty lay not with the President; he had always summoned Adonis on matters such as these. The difficulty lay with Doctor Nattore. He knew the Doctor well. A brilliant medical man, a teacher whose death would definitely be a loss to Sicily, his resignation a loss to the University. Also that most pompous of bores, a man of inflexible principles and true honor. But even he must have heard of the great Don Croce, even he must have a grain of common sense embedded in his genius brain. There must be something else.

In front of the main building was a long black car and leaning against it were two men dressed in business suits which failed to make them look respectable. They must be the Don's bodyguards and chauffeur left down here out of respect for the academics Don Croce was visiting. Adonis saw their looks of astonishment and then amusement at his small stature, his perfect tailoring, the briefcase under his arm. He flashed a cold stare which startled them. Could such a small man be a Friend of the Friends?

The office of the President looked more like a library than a business center; he was a scholar more than an administrator. Books lined all the walls, the furniture was massive but comfortable. Don Croce sat in a huge chair sipping his espresso. His face reminded Hector Adonis of the prow of a ship in the Iliad, warped by years of battle and hostile seas. The Don pretended they had never met, and Adonis allowed himself to be introduced. The President of course knew this was a farce, but young Doctor Nattore was taken in.

The President was the tallest man at the University; Hector Adonis was the shortest. Immediately, out of courtesy, the President sat down and slumped in his chair before he spoke.

"We have a small disagreement," the President said. At this Doctor Nattore snorted with exasperation, but Don Croce inclined his head slightly in accord. The President went on. "Don Croce has a nephew who yearns to be a doctor. Professor Nattore says he does not have the necessary grades to be certified. A tragedy. Don Croce has been so kind as to come and present his nephew's case, and since Don Croce has done so much for our University, I thought we should try our best to grant him some accommodation."

Don Croce said amiably without a hint of sarcasm, "I'm illiterate myself, yet no one can say I have been unsuccessful in the world of business." Certainly, Hector Adonis thought, a man who could bribe ministers, order murders, terrify shopkeepers and factory owners did not have to read and write. Don Croce continued, "I found my path by experience. Why could not my nephew do the same? My poor sister will be heartbroken if her son does not have the word 'Doctor' in front of his name. She is a true believer in Christ, she wants to help the world."

Doctor Nattore, with that insensitivity so common to one who is in the right, said, "I cannot change my position."

Don Croce sighed. He said cajolingly, "What harm can my nephew do? I will arrange a government post with the army, or with a Catholic hospital for the aged. He will hold their hands and listen to their troubles. He is extremely amiable, he will charm the old wrecks. What do I ask? A little shuffling of the papers you shuffle here." He glanced around the room, contemptuous of the books that formed its walls.

Hector Adonis, extremely disturbed by this meekness of Don Croce, a danger signal in such a man, thought angrily that it was easy for the Don to take such a position. His men immediately shipped him to Switzerland at the slightest indisposition of his liver. But Adonis knew it was up to him to solve this impasse. "My dear Doctor Nattore," he said, "surely we can do something. A little private tutoring, extra training at a charity hospital?"

Despite his birth in Palermo, Doctor Nattore did not look Sicilian. He was fair and balding and he showed his anger, something no true Sicilian would ever do in this delicate situation. Doubtless it was the defective genes inherited from some long-ago Norman conqueror. "You don't understand, my dear Professor Adonis. The young fool wants to be a surgeon."

Jesus, Joseph, our Virgin Mary and all her Saints, Hector Adonis thought. This is real trouble.

Taking advantage of the stunned silence on his colleague's face, Doctor Nattore went on. "Your nephew knows nothing about anatomy. He hacked a cadaver to pieces as if he were carving a sheep for the spit. He misses most of his classes, he does not prepare for his test papers, he enters the operating room as if he were going to a dance. I admit he is amiable, you couldn't find a nicer chap. But, after all, we are talking about a man who will someday have to enter a human body with a sharp knife."

Hector Adonis knew exactly what Don Croce was thinking. Who cared how bad a surgeon the boy would make? It was a matter of family prestige, the loss of respect if the boy failed. No matter how bad a surgeon, he would never kill as many as Don Croce's more busy employees. Also, this young Doctor Nattore had not bent to his will, not taken the hint, that Don Croce was willing to let the surgeon business go by, that he was willing for his nephew to be a medical doctor.

So now it was time for Hector Adonis to settle the issue. "My dear Don Croce," he said, "I am sure that Doctor Nattore will accede to your wishes if we continue to persuade him. But why this romantic idea of your nephew to be a surgeon? As you say, he's too amiable, and surgeons are born sadists. And who in Sicily voluntarily goes under the knife?" He paused for a moment. Then he went on. "Also he must train in Rome, if we pass him here, and the Romans will use any excuse to demolish a Sicilian. You do your nephew a disservice to insist. Let me propose a compromise."

Doctor Nattore muttered that no compromise was possible. For the first time the lizardlike eyes of Don Croce flashed fire. Doctor Nattore fell silent and Hector Adonis rushed on. "Your nephew will receive passing marks to become a doctor, not a surgeon. We will say he has too kind a heart to cut."

Don Croce spread wide his arms, his lips parted in a cold smile. "You have defeated me with your good sense and your reasonableness," he said to Adonis. "So be it. My nephew will be a doctor, not a surgeon. And my sister must be content." He made haste to leave them, his real purpose achieved; he had not hoped for more. The President of the University escorted him down to the car. But everyone in that room noted the last glance Don Croce gave Doctor Nattore before he left. It was a glance of the closest scrutiny as if he were memorizing the features, to make sure that he did not forget the face of this man who had tried to thwart his will.

When they had left, Hector Adonis turned to Doctor Nattore and said, "You, my dear colleague, must resign from the University and go practice your trade in Rome."

Doctor Nattore said angrily, "Are you mad?"

Hector Adonis said, "Not as mad as you. I insist you have dinner with me tonight and I will explain to you why our Sicily is no Garden of Eden."

"But why should I leave?" Doctor Nattore protested.

"You have said the word 'no' to Don Croce Malo. Sicily is not big enough for both of you."

"But he's gotten his way," Doctor Nattore cried out in despair. "The nephew will become a doctor. You and the President have approved it."

"But you did not," Hector Adonis said. "We approved it to save your life. But still, you are now a marked man."

That evening Hector Adonis was host to six professors, including Doctor Nattore, at one of Palermo's best restaurants. Each of these professors had received a visit from a "man of honor" that day and each had agreed to change the marks of a failing pupil. Doctor Nattore listened to their stories with horror and then finally said, "But that cannot be in a medical school, not a doctor," until finally they lost their temper with him. A Professor of Philosophy demanded to know why the practice of medicine was more important to the human race than the intricate thought processes of the human mind and the immortal sanctity of one's soul. When they were finished Doctor Nattore agreed to leave the University of Palermo and emigrate to Brazil, where, he was assured by his colleagues, a good surgeon could make his fortune in gall bladders.

That night Hector Adonis slept the sleep of the just. But the next morning he received an urgent phone call from Montelepre. His godson, Turi Guiliano, whose intelligence he had nurtured, whose gentleness he had prized, whose future he had planned, had murdered a policeman.

CHAPTER 3

Montelepre was a town of seven thousand people, sunk as deeply in the valley of the Cammarata Mountains as it was in poverty.

On the day of September 2, 1943, the citizens were preparing for their Festa, to start the next day and continue for the following three days.

The Festa was the greatest event of the year in each town, greater than Easter or Christmas or New Year's, greater than the days celebrating the end of the great war or the birthday of a great national hero. The Festa was dedicated to the town's own particular favorite saint. It was one of the few customs the Fascist government of Mussolini had dared not meddle with or try to forbid.

To organize the Festa, a Committee of Three was formed each year, composed of the most respected men of the town. These three men then appointed deputies to collect money and offerings of goods. Every family contributed according to their means. In addition deputies were sent out into the streets to beg.

Then as the great day approached, the Committee of Three started to spend the special fund accumulated over the past year. They hired a band, and they hired a clown. They set up generous money prizes for horse races to be held over the three days. They hired specialists to decorate the church and the streets so that the grim poverty-stricken town of Montelepre suddenly looked like some medieval citadel in the midst of the Fields of the Cloths of Gold. A puppet theater was hired. Food peddlers set up their booths.

The families of Montelepre used the Festa to show their marriageable daughters; new clothes were bought, chaperones detailed. A bevy of prostitutes from Palermo set up a huge tent just outside of town, their licenses and medical certificates adorning the red-, white-, and green-striped canvas sides. A famous holy friar, who years ago had grown stigmata, was hired to preach the formal sermon. And finally, on the third day, the saint's bier was carried through the streets followed by all the townspeople, with their livestock of mules, horses, pigs and donkeys. On top of the bier rode the effigy of the saint, crusted with money, flowers, varicolored sweets and great bamboo-sheathed bottles of wine.

These few days were their days of glory. It did not matter that for the rest of the year they starved and that in the same village square where they honored the saint, they sold the sweat of their bodies to the land barons for a hundred lire a day.

On the first day of the Montelepre Festa, Turi Guiliano was designated to take part in the opening ritual, the mating of the Miracle Mule of Montelepre with the town's largest and strongest donkey. It is rare that a female mule can conceive; they are classified as a sterile animal, product of the union between a mare and donkey. But there was such a mule in Montelepre; it had borne a donkey two years before, and its owner had agreed, as his family's duty share to the town Festa, to donate the mule's services and, if the miracle should occur, its offspring to the next year's Festa. There was in this particular ceremony a sardonic mockery.

But the ritualistic mating was only partly a mockery. The Sicilian peasant has an affinity with his mule and donkey. They are hard-working beasts, and like the peasant himself have flinty, dour natures. Like the peasant they can work steadily for very long hours without breaking down, unlike the higher-nobility horse, who must be pampered. Also, they are surefooted and can pick their way along the mountain terraces without falling and breaking a leg, unlike the fiery stallions or the high-blooded, flighty mares. Also, peasant and donkey and mule subsist and thrive on food that kills other men and animals. But the greatest affinity was this: Peasant, donkey and mule had to be treated with affection and respect, otherwise they turned murderous and stubborn.

The Catholic religious festivals had sprung from ancient pagan rituals to beg miracles from the gods. On this fateful day in September 1943, during the Festa of the town of Montelepre, a miracle would occur that would change the fate of its seven thousand inhabitants.

At twenty years of age Turi Guiliano was considered the bravest, the most honorable, the strongest, the young man who inspired the most respect. He was a man of honor. That is to say, a man who treated his fellow man with scrupulous fairness and one who could not be insulted with impunity.

He had distinguished himself at the last harvest by refusing to be hired out as a laborer at the insulting wages decreed by the overseer of the local estates. He then gave a speech to the other men urging them not to work, to let the harvest rot. The carabinieri arrested him on charges made by the Baron. The other men went back to work. Guiliano had not shown any hard feelings toward these men or even the carabinieri. When he was released from prison through the intervention of Hector Adonis, he developed no rancor of any kind. He had stood up for his principles and that was enough for him.

On another occasion, he had broken up a knife fight between Aspanu Pisciotta and another youth simply by interposing his unarmed body between them and with good-humored reasoning disarming their anger.

What was unusual about this was that in any other person these actions would have been taken as signs of cowardice masquerading as humanity, but something in Guiliano forbade this interpretation.

On this second day of September, Salvatore Guiliano, called Turi by his friends and family, was brooding over what was to him a devastating blow to his masculine pride.

It was only a little thing. The town of Montelepre had no movie theater, no community hall, but there was one little cafi with a billiard table. The night before, Turi Guiliano, his cousin Gaspare "Aspanu" Pisciotta and a few other youths had been playing billiards. Some of the older men of the town had been watching them while drinking glasses of wine. One of the men, by the name of Guido Quintana, was slightly drunk. He was a man of reputation. He had been imprisoned by Mussolini for being a suspected member of the Mafia. The American conquest of the island had resulted in his being released as a victim of fascism, and it was rumored that he was going to be named as Mayor of Montelepre.

As well as any Sicilian. Turi Guiliano knew the legendary power of the Mafia. In these past few months of freedom, its snakelike head had begun weaving over the land, as if fertilized by the fresh loam of a new democratic government. It was already whispered in town that shopkeepers were paying "insurance" to certain "men of respect." And of course Turi knew the history, the countless murders of peasants who tried to collect their wages from powerful nobles and landlords, how tightly the Mafia had controlled the island before Mussolini had decimated them with his own disregard for the lawful process, like a deadlier snake biting a less powerful reptile with its poisoned fangs. So Turi Guiliano sensed the terror that lay ahead.

Quintana now regarded Guiliano and his companions with a slightly contemptuous eye. Perhaps their high spirits irritated him. He was, after all, a serious man, about to embark on a pivotal part of his life: Exiled by Mussolini's government to a desert island, he was now back in the town of his birth. His aim in the next few months was to establish respect in the eyes of the townspeople.

Or perhaps it was the handsomeness of Guiliano that irritated him, for Guido Quintana was an extremely ugly man. His appearance was intimidating not from any single feature but from a lifelong habit of presenting a formidable front to the outside world. Or perhaps it was the natural antagonism of a born villain toward a born hero.

In any case he got up suddenly just in time to jostle Guiliano as he went by to the other side of the billiard table. Turi, naturally courteous to a much older man, made an apology that was gentle and sincere. Guido Quintana looked him up and down with contempt. "Why aren't you home sleeping and resting to earn your bread tomorrow?" he said. "My friends have been waiting to play billiards for an hour." He reached out and took the billiard cue from Guiliano's hand and, smiling slightly, waved him away from the table.

Everybody was watching. The insult was not mortal. If the man were younger or the insult more pointed, Guiliano would have been forced to fight and keep his reputation for manhood. Aspanu Pisciotta always carried a knife, and now he positioned himself to intercept Quintana's friends if they decided to interfere. Pisciotta had no respect for older people, and he expected his friend and cousin to finish the quarrel.

But at that moment Guiliano felt a strange uneasiness. The man looked so intimidating and ready for the most serious consequences of any dispute. The companions in the background, also older men, were smiling in an amused way as if they had no doubt of the outcome. One of them wore hunting attire and carried a rifle. Guiliano himself was unarmed. And then for one shameful moment, he felt fear. He was not afraid of being hurt, of being struck, of finding this man was the stronger of the two. It was the fear that these men knew what they were doing, that they had the situation under control. He did not. That they could gun him down in the dark streets of Montelepre as he walked home. That he would appear a dead fool the next day. It was the inborn tactical sense of the born guerrilla soldier that made him retreat.

So Turi Guiliano took his friend by the arm and led him out of the cafe. Pisciotta came without a struggle, amazed that his friend had yielded so easily but never suspecting the fear. He knew Turi was good-hearted and assumed he did not wish to quarrel and injure another man over so small a thing. As they started up the Via Bella to their homes they could hear the click of billiard balls behind them.

All that night Turi Guiliano had not been able to sleep. Had he really been afraid of that man with the evil face and threatening body? Had he shivered like a girl? Were they all laughing at him? What did his best friend, his cousin, Aspanu, think of him now? That he was a coward? That he, Turi Guiliano, the leader of the youth of Montelepre, the most respected, the one acknowledged as the strongest and most fearless, had buckled at the first threat of a true man? And yet, he told himself, why risk a vendetta that could lead to death over the small matter of a billiard game, an older man's irascible rudeness? It would not have been like a quarrel with another youth. He had known that this quarrel could be serious. He had known that these men were with the Friends of the Friends, and it had made him afraid.

Guiliano slept badly and woke in that sullen mood so dangerous in adolescent males. He seemed to himself ridiculous. He had always wanted to be a hero, like most young men. If he had lived in any other part of Italy he would have become a soldier long before, but as a true Sicilian he had not volunteered, and his godfather, Hector Adonis, had made certain arrangements so that he wouldn't be called. After all, though Italy governed Sicily, no true Sicilian felt he was an Italian. And then, if the truth be told, the Italian government itself was not so anxious to draft Sicilians, especially in the last year of the war. Sicilians had too many relatives in America, Sicilians were born criminals and renegades, Sicilians were too stupid to be trained in modern warfare and they caused trouble wherever they went.

In the street Turi Guiliano felt his moodiness fade with the sheer beauty of the day. The golden sun was glorious, the smell of lemon and olive trees filled the air. He loved the town of Montelepre, its crooked streets, the stone houses with their balconies filled with those gaudy flowers that grew in Sicily without the slightest encouragement. He loved the red-tiled roofs that stretched away to the end of the small town, buried in this deep valley on which the sun poured like liquid gold.

The elaborate decorations of the Festa – the streets overhung with an aerial maze of colorful papier-mache saints, the houses decorated with great bamboo-strutted flowers – disguised the essential poverty of what was a typical Sicilian town. Perched high, yet shyly hidden in the creases of the surrounding mountains, its garlanded houses were mostly filled with men, women, children and animals occupying three or four rooms. Many houses had no sanitation, and even the thousands of flowers and the cold mountain air could not overcome the smell of offal that rose with the sun.

In good weather the people lived outside their houses. The women sat in wooden chairs on their cobbled terraces preparing food for their tables, also set outside the door. Young children filled the streets chasing chickens, turkeys, young goats; older children wove bamboo baskets. At the end of the Via Bella, before it emptied into the square, was a huge demon-faced fountain, built by the Greeks two thousand years before, water pouring from its rock-toothed mouth. Alongside the surrounding mountains green gardens grew precariously, built on terraces. On the plains below were the visible towns of Partinico and Castellammare; the bloody dark stone town of Corleone lurked murderously beyond the horizon.

From the far end of the Via Bella, the end of the street that led into the road of the Castellammare plain, Turi could see Aspanu Pisciotta leading a small donkey. For a moment he was worried about how Aspanu would treat him after his humiliation of the night before. His friend was noted for his sharp wit. Would he make some contemptuous remark? Guiliano felt again the rush of futile rage and swore he would not be so unready again. There would be no regard for any consequences, he would show them all he was no coward. Yet in a corner of his mind he saw the whole scene sharp and clear. Quintana's friends waiting behind him, one of them with a hunting rifle. They were Friends of the Friends and would avenge themselves. He did not fear them, he feared only his defeat by them, which seemed so sure because though they were not so strong, they were more cruel.

Aspanu Pisciotta wore his wickedly cheery grin as he said, "Turi, this little donkey can't do it all by himself. We'll have to help."

Guiliano didn't bother to answer; he was relieved that his friend had forgotten about last night. It always touched his heart that Aspanu, who was so caustic and penetrating with the faults of others, never treated him with anything but the utmost affection and respect. They walked together toward the town square, the donkey behind. Children scurried around and before them like pilot fish. The children knew what was going to happen with the donkey and were wild with excitement. For them it would be a great treat, an exciting event in the usually dull summer day.

A small platform four feet high stood in the town square. It was formed by heavy blocks of stone carved from the mountains around them. Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta pushed the donkey up the dirt ramp of the platform. They used a rope to tie the donkey's head to a short vertical iron bar. The donkey sat down. There was a patch of white skin over his eyes and muzzle that gave him a clownish look. The children gathered around the platform, laughed and jeered. One of the little boys called out, "Which one is the donkey?" and all the children laughed.

Turi Guiliano, not knowing this was the last day of his life as an unknown village boy, looked down on the scene with the sweet possessive contentment of a man placed exactly as he should be. He was in the small spot of earth in which he had been born and spent his life. The outside world could never harm him. Even the humiliation of the night before had disappeared. He knew those looming limestone mountains as intimately as a little child knew his sandbox. Those mountains grew slabs of stone as easily as they grew grass, and formed caves and hiding places that could shelter an army. Turi Guiliano knew every house, every farm, every laborer, and all the ruined castles left by the Normans and Moors, the skeletons of beautifully decayed temples left by the Greeks.

From another entrance to the square appeared a farmer leading the Miracle Mule. This was the man who had employed them for this morning's work. His name was Papera, and he was held in much respect by the citizens of Montelepre for having waged a successful vendetta against a neighbor. They had quarreled over an adjoining piece of land which held an olive grove. The quarrel went on for ten years, had in fact lasted longer than all of the wars Mussolini had foisted on Italy. Then one night shortly after the Allied Armies had liberated Sicily and installed a democratic government, the neighbor had been found almost cut in two by the blast of a lupara, the sawed-off shotgun so popular in Sicily for such matters. Suspicion immediately fell on Papera, but he had conveniently allowed himself to be arrested in a quarrel with the carabinieri and had spent the night of the murder safely in the prison cell of the Bellampo Barracks. It was rumored that this was the first sign of the old Mafia coming to life, that Papera – related by marriage to Guido Quintana – had enlisted the Friends of the Friends to help settle the quarrel.

As Papera led the mule to the front of the platform, the children swarmed around it so that Papera had to scatter them with mild curses and casual waves of the whip he held in his hand. The children escaped the whip easily as Papera snapped it over their heads with a good-humored smile.

Smelling the female mule below, the white-faced donkey reared against the rope that held him to the platform. Turi and Aspanu lifted him up as the children cheered. Meanwhile Papera was maneuvering the mule to present its hindquarters to the edge of the platform.

At this point Frisella, the barber, came out of his shop to join in the fun. Behind him was the Maresciallo, pompous and important, rubbing his smooth red face. He was the only man in Montelepre who had himself shaved every day. Even on the platform Guiliano could smell the strong cologne with which the barber had showered him.

Maresciallo Roccofino cast a professional eye over the crowd that had accumulated in the square. As the Commander of the local National Police detachment twelve men strong he was responsible for law and order in the town. The Festa was always a troublesome time, and he had already ordered a four-man patrol for the town square, but they had not yet arrived. He also watched the town benefactor, Papera, with his Miracle Mule. He was certain that Papera had ordered the murder of his neighbor. These Sicilian savages were quick to take advantage of their sacred liberties. They would all regret the loss of Mussolini, the Maresciallo thought grimly. Compared with the Friends of the Friends, the dictator would be remembered as another gentle Saint Francis of Assisi.

Frisella the barber was the buffoon of Montelepre. Idle men who could not find work clustered in his shop to hear his jokes and listen to his gossip. He was one of those barbers who serviced himself better than his customers. His mustache was exquisitely trimmed, his hair pomaded and strictly combed, but he had the face of a clown in the puppet shows. Bulbous nose; a wide mouth that hung open like a gate and a lower jaw without a chin.

Now he shouted, "Turi, bring your beasts into my shop and I'll anoint them with perfume. Your donkey will think he's making love to a duchess."

Turi ignored him. Frisella had cut his hair when he was a little boy, and so badly that his mother had taken over the task. But his father still went to Frisella to share in the town gossip and tell his own tales about America to awestruck listeners. Turi Guiliano did not like the barber because Frisella had been a strong Fascist and was reputed to be a confidant of the Friends of the Friends.

The Maresciallo lit a cigarette and strutted up the Via Bella not even noticing Guiliano – an oversight he was to regret in the weeks to come.

The donkey was now trying to jump off the platform. Guiliano let the rope slacken so that Pisciotta could lead the animal to the edge and position it above where the Miracle Mule was standing. The mare's hindquarters were just above the edge of the platform. Guiliano let the rope slacken a little more. The mare gave a great snort and pushed her rump back at the same moment the donkey plunged downward. The donkey grasped the hindquarters of the mare with his forelegs, gave a few convulsive jumps and hung in midair with a comical look of bliss on his white-patched face. Papera and Pisciotta were laughing as Guiliano pulled savagely on the rope and brought the limp donkey back to its iron bar. The crowd cheered and shouted blessings. The children were already scattering through the streets in search of other amusements.

Papera, still laughing, said, "If we could all live like donkeys, eh, what a life."

Pisciotta said disrespectfully, "Signor Papera, let me load your back with bamboo and olive baskets and beat you up the mountain roads for eight hours every day. That's a donkey's life."

The farmer scowled at him. He caught the sly reproach, that he was paying them too little for this job. He had never liked Pisciotta and had in fact given Guiliano the job. Everybody in the town of Montelepre was fond of Turi. But Pisciotta was another matter. His tongue was too sharp and his manner too languid. Lazy. The fact that he had a weak chest was no excuse. He could still smoke cigarettes, court the loose girls of Palermo and dress like a dandy. And that clever little mustache in the French style. He could cough himself to death and go to the devil with his weak chest, Papera thought. He gave them their two hundred lire, for which Guiliano thanked him courteously, and then took himself and his mare back on the road to his farm. The two young men untied the donkey and led it back to Guiliano's house. The donkey's work had just begun; he had a much less pleasant task before him.

Guiliano's mother had an early lunch waiting for the two boys. Turi's two sisters, Mariannina and Giuseppina, were helping their mother make pasta for the evening meal. Eggs and flour were mixed into a huge mountain on a shellacked square wooden board, kneaded solid. Then a knife was used to cut the sign of the cross into the dough to sanctify it. Next Mariannina and Giuseppina cut off strips they rolled around a blade of sisal grass, and then pulled out the grass to leave a hole in the tube of dough. Huge bowls of olives and grapes decorated the room.

Turi's father was working in the fields, a short working day so he could join the Festa in the afternoon. On the next day Mariannina was to become engaged and there was to be a special party at the Guiliano house.

Turi had always been Maria Lombardo Guiliano's most beloved child. The sisters remembered him as a baby being bathed every day by the mother. The tin basin carefully warmed by the stove, the mother testing the temperature of the water with her elbow, the special soap fetched from Palermo. The sisters had been jealous at first, then fascinated by the mother's tender washing of the naked male infant. He never cried as a baby, was always gurgling with laughter as his mother crooned over him and declared his body perfect. He was the youngest in the family but grew to be the most forceful. And he was to them always a little strange. He read books and talked about politics, and of course it was always remarked that his height and formidable physique came from his time in the womb in America. But they loved him too because of his gentleness and his selflessness.

On this morning, the women were worried about Turi and watched him with a loving fretfulness as he ate his bread and goat cheese, his plate of olives, drank his coffee made of chicory. As soon as he finished his lunch he and Aspanu would take the donkey all the way to Corleone and smuggle back a huge wheel of cheese and some hams and sausage. He would miss a day of the Festa to do this just to please his mother and make his sister's engagement party a success. Part of the goods they would sell for cash on the black market for the family coffers.

These three women loved to see the two young men together. They had been friends since they were little children, closer than brothers in spite of being such opposites. Aspanu Pisciotta, with his dark coloring, his thin movie star mustache, the extraordinary mobility of his face, the brilliant dark eyes and jet black hair on his small skull, his wit, always enchanted the women. And yet in some curious way all this flamboyance was overwhelmed by Turi Guiliano's quiet Grecian beauty. He was massively built like the ancient Greek statues scattered all over Sicily. And his coloring was all light brown – his hair, his tawny skin. He was always very still, and yet when he moved it was with a startling quickness. But his most dominating feature was his eyes. They were a dreamy golden brown, and when they were averted they seemed ordinary. But when he looked at you directly the lids came halfway down like the lids carved in statues and the whole face took on a quiet masklike serenity.

While Pisciotta kept Maria Lombardo amused, Turi Guiliano went upstairs to his bedroom to prepare himself for the journey he was about to make. Specifically to get the pistol he kept hidden there. Remembering the humiliation of the previous night, he was determined to go armed on the job he had ahead this day. He knew how to shoot, for his father took him hunting often.

In the kitchen, his mother was waiting alone for him to say goodbye. She embraced him and felt the pistol he had in his waistband.

"Turi, be careful," she said, alarmed. "Don't quarrel with the carabinieri. If they stop you, give up what you have."

Guiliano reassured her. "They can take the goods," he said. "But I won't let them beat me or take me to prison."

She understood this. And in her own fierce Sicilian pride was proud of him. Many years ago her own pride, her anger at her poverty, had led her to persuade her husband to try a new life in America. She had been a dreamer, she had believed in justice and her own rightful place in the world. She had saved a fortune in America, and that same pride had made her decide to return to Sicily to live like a queen. And then everything had turned to ashes. The lira became worthless in wartime, and she was poor again. She was resigned to her fate but hoped for her children. And she was happy when Turi showed the same spirit that had possessed her. But she dreaded the day when he must come into conflict with the stone-hard realities of life in Sicily.

She watched him go out into the cobbled street of the Via Bella to greet Aspanu Pisciotta. Her son, Turi, walked like a huge cat, his chest so broad, his arms and legs so muscular he made Aspanu seem no more than a stalk of sisal grass. Aspanu had the hard cunning that her son lacked, the cruelty in his courage. Aspanu would guard Turi against the treacherous world they all had to live in. And she had a weakness for Aspanu's olive-skinned prettiness, though she believed her son more handsome.

She watched them go up the Via Bella to where it led out of town toward the Castellammare plain. Her son, Turi Guiliano, and her sister's son, Gaspare Pisciotta. Two young men just barely twenty years old, and seeming younger than their years. She loved them both and she feared for them both.

Finally the two men and their donkey vanished over a rise in the street, but she kept watching and finally they appeared again, high above the town of Montelepre, entering the range of mountains that surrounded the town. Maria Lombardo Guiliano kept watching, as if she would never see them again, until they disappeared in the late morning mist around the mountaintop. They were vanishing into the beginning of their myth.

CHAPTER 4

In Sicily this September of 1943, people could only exist by trading in the black market. Strict rationing of foodstuffs still carried over from the war, and farmers had to turn in their produce to central government storehouses at fixed prices and for paper money that was almost worthless. In turn the government was supposed to sell and distribute these foodstuffs at low prices to the people. Under this system everybody would get enough to remain alive. In reality, the farmers hid what they could because what they turned in to the government storehouses was appropriated by Don Croce Malo and his mayors to be sold on the black market. The people themselves then had to buy on the black market and break smuggling laws merely to exist. If they were caught doing this they were prosecuted and sent to jail. What good was it that a democratic government had been established in Rome? They would be able to vote as they starved.

Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta, with the lightest of hearts, were in the process of breaking these laws. It was Pisciotta who had all the black market contacts and who had arranged this affair. He had contracted with a farmer to smuggle a great wheel of cheese from the countryside to a black market dealer in Montelepre. Their pay for this would be four smoked hams and a basket of sausage which would make his sister's engagement party a great celebration. They were breaking two laws, one forbidding dealing in the black market, the other smuggling from one province of Italy to another. There was not much the authorities could do to enforce the black market laws; they would have had to jail everyone in Sicily. But smuggling was another matter. Patrols of National Police, the carabinieri, roamed the countryside, set up roadblocks, paid informers. They could not of course interfere with the caravans of Don Croce Malo who used American Army trucks and special military government passes. But they could net many of the small farmers and starving villagers.

It took them four hours to get to the farm. Guiliano and Pisciotta picked up the huge grainy white cheese and the other goods and strapped them onto the donkey. They formed a camouflage of sisal grass and bamboo stalks over the goods so that it would appear they were merely bringing in fodder for the livestock kept in the households of many villagers. They had the carelessness and confidence of youth, of children really, who hide treasures from their parents, as if the intention to deceive were enough. Their confidence came too from the knowledge that they could find hidden paths through the mountains.

As they set out for the long journey home, Guiliano sent Pisciotta ahead to scout for the carabinieri. They had arranged a set of whistling signals to warn of danger. The donkey carried the cheeses easily and behaved amiably – he had had his reward before setting out. They journeyed for two hours, slowly ascending, before there was any sign of danger. Then Guiliano saw behind them, perhaps three miles away, following their path, a caravan of six mules and a man on horseback. If the path was known to others in the black market, it could have been marked by the field police for a roadblock. As a caution, he sent Pisciotta scouting far ahead.

After an hour he caught up with Aspanu, who was sitting on a huge stone smoking a cigarette and coughing. Aspanu looked pale; he should not have been smoking. Turi Guiliano sat down beside him to rest. One of their strongest bonds since childhood was that they never tried to command each other in any way, so Turi said nothing. Finally Aspanu stubbed out the cigarette and put the blackened butt into his pocket. They started walking again, Guiliano holding the donkey's bridle, Aspanu walking behind.

They were traveling a mountain path that bypassed the roads and little villages but sometimes they saw an ancient Greek water cistern that spouted water through a crumpled statue's mouth, or the remains of a Norman castle that many centuries ago had barred this way to invaders. Again Turi Guiliano dreamed of Sicily's past and his future. He thought of his godfather, Hector Adonis, who had promised to come after the Festa and prepare his application to the University of Palermo. And when he thought of his godfather he felt momentary sadness. Hector Adonis never came to the Festas; the drunken men would make fun of his short stature, the children, some of them taller than he, would offer him some insult. Turi wondered about God stunting the growth of a man's body and bursting his brain with knowledge. For Turi thought Hector Adonis the most brilliant man in the world and loved him for the kindness he had showed him and his parents.

He thought of his father working so hard on their small piece of land, and of his sisters with their threadbare clothes. It was lucky that Mariannina was so beautiful that she had caught a husband despite her poverty and the unsettled times. But most of all he anguished over his mother, Maria Lombardo. Even as a child he had recognized her bitterness, her unhappiness. She had tasted the rich fruits of America and could no longer be happy in the poverty-stricken towns of Sicily. His father would tell the tales of those glorious days and his mother would burst into tears.

But he would change his family's fortune, Turi Guiliano thought. He would work hard and study hard and he would become as great a man as his godfather.

Suddenly they were passing through a stand of trees, a small forest, one of the few left in this part of Sicily, which now seemed to grow only the great white stones and marble quarries. On the other side of the mountain they would begin the descent into Montelepre and would have to be careful of the roving patrols of National Police, the carabinieri. But now they were coming to the Quattro Moline, the Four Crossroads, and it would pay to be a little careful here too. Guiliano pulled on the donkey's bridle and motioned Aspanu to halt. They stood there quietly. No strange sound could be heard, only the steady hum of the countless insects that swarmed over the ground, their whirring wings and legs buzzing like a far distant saw. They moved forward over the crossroads and then safely out of sight into another small forest. Turi Guiliano started to daydream again.

The trees widened out suddenly, as if they had been pushed back, and they were picking their way across a small clearing with a rough floor of tiny stones, cropped bamboo stalks, thin balding grass. The late afternoon sun was falling far away from them and looked pale and cold above the granite-studded mountains. Past this clearing the path would begin to drop in a long winding spiral to the town of Montelepre. Suddenly Guiliano came out of his dreams. A flash of light like the striking of a match lanced his left eye. He jerked the donkey to a halt and held up his hand to Aspanu.

Only thirty yards away, strange men stepped out from behind a thicket. There were three of them, and Turi Guiliano saw their stiff black military caps, the black uniforms with white piping. He felt a sick foolish feeling of despair, of shame, that he had been caught. The three men fanned out as they advanced, weapons at the ready. Two were quite young with ruddy shining faces and crusted military caps tilted almost comically to the backs of their heads. They seemed earnest yet gleeful as they pointed their machine pistols.

The carabiniere in the center was older and held a rifle. His face was pockmarked and scarred and his cap was pulled firmly over his eyes. He had sergeant's stripes on his sleeve. The flash of light Guiliano had seen was a sunbeam drawn by the steel rifle barrel. This man was smiling grimly, his rifle pointed unwaveringly at Guiliano's chest. Guiliano's despair turned to anger at that smile.

The Sergeant with the rifle stepped closer, his two fellow guards closing in from either side. Now Turi Guiliano was alert. The two young carabinieri with their machine pistols were not so much to be feared; they were carelessly approaching the donkey, not taking their prisoners seriously. They motioned Guiliano and Pisciotta away from the donkey and one of them let his pistol sway back on its sling as he stripped the camouflage bamboo from the donkey's back. When he saw the goods he let out a whistle of greedy delight. He didn't notice Aspanu edging closer to him but the Sergeant with the rifle did. He shouted, "You, with the mustache, move away," and Aspanu stepped back closer to Turi Guiliano.

The Sergeant moved a little closer. Guiliano watched him intently. The pockmarked face seemed to be fatigued; but the man's eyes gleamed when he said, "Well, young fellows, that's a nice bit of cheese. We could use it in our barracks to go with our macaroni. So just tell us the name of the farmer you got it from and we'll let you ride your donkey back home."

They did not answer him. He waited. Still they did not answer.

Finally, Guiliano said quietly, "I have a thousand lire as a gift, if you can let us go."

"You can wipe your ass with lire," the Sergeant said. "Now, your identity papers. If they're not in order I'll make you shit and wipe your ass with them too."

The insolence of the words, the insolence of those black-and-white piped uniforms, aroused an icy fury in Guiliano. At that moment he knew he would never allow himself to be arrested, never allow these men to rob him of his family's food.

Turi Guiliano took out his identity card and started to approach the Sergeant. He was hoping to get under the arc of the pointed rifle. He knew his physical coordination was faster than that of most men and he was willing to gamble on it. But the rifle motioned him back. The man said, "Throw it on the ground." Guiliano did so.

Pisciotta, five paces on Guiliano's left, and knowing what was in his friend's mind, knowing he carried the pistol under his shirt, tried to distract the Sergeant's attention. He said with studied insolence, his body thrust forward, hand on hip touching the knife he carried in a sheath strapped to his back, "Sergeant, if we give you the farmer's name, why do you need our identity cards? A bargain's a bargain." He paused for a moment and said sarcastically, "We know a carabiniere always keeps his word." He spat out the word "carabiniere" with hatred.

The rifleman sauntered a few steps toward Pisciotta. He stopped. He smiled and leveled his gun. He said, "And you, my little dandy, your card. Or do you have no papers, like your donkey, who has a better mustache than you?"

The two younger policemen laughed. Pisciotta's eyes glittered. He took a step toward the Sergeant. "No, I have no papers. And I know no farmer. We found these goods lying in the road."

The very foolhardiness of this defiance defeated its purpose. Pisciotta had wanted the rifleman to move closer within striking distance, but now the Sergeant took a few steps backward and smiled again. He said, "The bastinado will knock out some of your Sicilian insolence." He paused for a moment and then said. "Both of you, lie on the ground."

The bastinado was a term loosely used for a physical beating with whips and clubs. Guiliano knew some citizens of Montelepre who had been punished in the Bellampo Barracks. They had returned to their homes with broken knees, heads swollen as big as melons, their insides injured so that they could never work again. The carabinieri would never do that to him. Guiliano went to one knee as if he were going to lie down, put one hand on the ground and the other on his belt so that he could draw the pistol from beneath his shirt. The clearing was now bathed with the soft hazy light of beginning twilight, the sun far over the trees had dipped below the last mountain. He saw Pisciotta standing proudly, refusing the command. Surely they would not shoot him down over a piece of smuggled cheese. He could see the pistols trembling in the hands of the young guards.

At that moment there was the braying of mules and the clatter of hooves from behind and bursting into the clearing came the caravan of mules that Guiliano had spotted on the road behind him that afternoon. The man on horseback leading it carried a lupara slung over his shoulder and looked huge in a heavy leather jacket. He jumped down off his horse and took a great wad of lire notes from one of his pockets and said to the carabiniere with the rifle, "So, you've scooped up a few little sardines this time." They obviously knew each other. For the first time the rifleman relaxed his vigilance to accept the money offered to him. The two men were grinning at each other. The prisoners seemed to have been forgotten by everyone.

Turi Guiliano moved slowly toward the nearest guard. Pisciotta was edging toward the nearest bamboo thicket. The guards didn't notice. Guiliano hit the nearest guard with his forearm, knocking him to the ground. He shouted to Pisciotta, "Run." Pisciotta dove into the bamboo thicket and Guiliano ran to the trees. The remaining guard was too stunned or too inept to bring his pistol around in time. Guiliano, about to plunge into the shelter of the forest, felt a quick sense of exultation. He launched his body into midair to dive between two sturdy trees that would shield him. As he did so he drew the pistol free from beneath his shirt.

But he had been right about the rifleman being the most dangerous. The Sergeant dropped the wad of money to the ground, swung his rifle up and very coolly shot. There was no mistaking the hit; Guiliano's body dropped like a dead bird.

Guiliano heard the shot at the same time he felt his body wracked with pain, as if he had been hit with a giant club. He landed on the ground between the two trees and tried to get up, but could not. His legs were numb; he could not make them move. Pistol in hand he twisted his body and saw the Sergeant shake his rifle in the air in triumph. And then Guiliano felt his trousers filling with blood, the liquid warm and sticky.

In the fraction of a second before he pulled the trigger of his pistol, Turi Guiliano felt only astonishment. That they had shot him over a piece of cheese. That they had smashed the fabric of his family with such a cruel carelessness just because he was running away from such a small breaking of the law that everyone broke. His mother would weep to the end of her days. And now his body was awash in blood, he who had never done anyone any harm.

He pulled the trigger and saw the rifle fall, saw the Sergeant's black cap with its white piping seem to fly in the air as the body with its mortal head wound crumpled and floated to the rock-filled earth. It was an impossible shot with a pistol at that range but it seemed to Guiliano that his own hand had traveled with the bullet and smashed it like a dagger through the Sergeant's eye.

A machine pistol began to pop but the bullets flew upward in harmless arcs, chattering like small birds. And then it was deadly still. Even the insects had stopped their incessant whirring.

Turi Guiliano rolled into the bushes. He had seen the enemy's face shatter into a mask of blood and that gave him hope. He was not powerless. He tried to get up again and this time his legs obeyed him. He began to run but only one leg sprang forward, the other dragged along the ground, which surprised him. His crotch was warm and sticky, his trousers soaked, his vision cloudy. When he ran through a sudden patch of light, he was afraid he had circled back into the clearing again and tried to turn back. His body started to fall – not to the ground, but into an endless red-tinted black void, and then he knew he was falling forever.

In the clearing the young guard took his hand off the trigger of his machine pistol and the chattering stopped. The smuggler rose from the ground with the huge wad of money in his hand and offered it to the other guard. The guard pointed his machine pistol at him and said, "You're under arrest."

The smuggler said, "You only have to split it two ways now. Let me go on."

The guards looked down at the fallen Sergeant. There was no doubt he was dead. The bullet had smashed eye and socket to pieces, and the wound was bubbling with a yellow liquid into which a gecko was already dipping its feelers.

The smuggler said, "I'll go into the bushes after him, he's hurt. I'll bring back his carcass and you two will be heroes. Just let me go."

The other guard picked up the identity card Turi had thrown down on the ground at the Sergeant's command. He read it aloud, "Salvatore Guiliano, the town of Montelepre."

"No need to look for him now," the other said. "We'll report back to headquarters, that's more important."

"Cowards," the smuggler said. He thought for a moment of unslinging his lupara but saw that they were looking at him with hatred. He had insulted them. For that insult they made him load the Sergeant's body onto his horse and made him walk back to their barracks. Before that they relieved him of his weapon. They were very skittish and he hoped they would not shoot him by mistake out of sheer nervousness. Aside from that he was not too concerned. He knew Maresciallo Roccofino of Montelepre very well. They had done business before and they would do business again.

In all that time not one of them had given a thought to Pisciotta. But he had heard everything they had said. He was lying in a deep grassy hollow, knife drawn. He was waiting for them to try hunting down Turi Guiliano, and he planned to ambush one of them and get his gun after he had cut his throat. There was a ferocity in his soul that banished all fear of death, and when he heard the smuggler offer to bring back Turi's carcass, he burned that man's face forever in his brain. He was almost sorry they retreated to leave him alone on the mountainside. He felt a pang when they tied his donkey to the end of the mule train.

But he knew that Turi was badly wounded and would need help. He circled around the clearing, running through the woods to get to the side where his comrade had disappeared. There was no sign of a body in the underbrush and he started to run down the path from which they had come.

There were still no signs until he climbed over a huge granite boulder whose top shallowed out into a small basin. In that basin of rock was a small pool of almost black blood and the other side of the rock was smeared with long ropy gouts of blood that were bright red. He kept running and was caught by surprise when he saw Guiliano's body sprawled across his path, the deadly pistol still clutched in his hand.

He knelt and took the pistol and thrust it into his belt. At that moment Turi Guiliano's eyes opened. The eyes were alive with an awesome hatred, but they were staring past Aspanu Pisciotta. Pisciotta almost wept with relief and tried to get him to his feet, but he was not strong enough. "Turi, try to get up, I'll help you," Pisciotta said. Guiliano pushed his hands against the earth and raised his body. Pisciotta put an arm around his waist and his hand became warm and wet. He jerked his hand away and pulled aside Guiliano's shirt, and with horror he saw the huge gaping hole in Guiliano's side. He propped Guiliano up against a tree, ripped off his own shirt and shoved it into the hole to staunch the blood, tying the sleeves together around the waist. He put one arm around his friend's middle and then with his free hand took Guiliano's left hand and raised it high in the air. This balanced them both as he guided Guiliano down the path with careful, mincing steps. From a distance it looked as if they were dancing together down the mountain.

And so Turi Guiliano missed the Festa of Saint Rosalia, which the citizens of Montelepre hoped would bring a miracle to their town.

He missed the shooting contest which he surely would have won. He missed the horse races in which the jockeys hit opposing riders over the head with clubs and whips. He missed the purple, yellow and green rockets that exploded and tattooed the star-filled sky.

He never tasted the magical sweets made of almond paste molded into the form of carrots, bamboo stalks and red tomatoes, all so sweet they numbed your entire body; or the spun sugar figures of the puppet knights of mythical romance, of Roland, Oliver and Charlemagne, their sugar swords studded with peppermints of ruby, emeralds of tiny fruit bits that the children brought home to bed to dream over before they went to sleep. At home his sister's engagement party went on without him.

The mating of the donkey and the Miracle Mule failed. There was no offspring. The citizens of Montelepre were disappointed. They did not know until years later that the Festa had produced its miracle in the person of the young man who had held the donkey.

CHAPTER 5

The abbot made his evening tour of the Franciscan monastery, spurring his lazy, good-for-nothing monks to earn their daily bread. He checked the bins in the holy relic workshop and visited the bakery turning out huge crusty loaves for nearby towns. He inspected the produce garden and the bamboo baskets filled to the brim with olives, tomatoes and grapes, looking for bruises on their satiny skins. His monks were all as busy as elves – though not so merry. In fact they were a sullen crew, with none of the joy necessary to serve God. The Abbot took a long black cheroot from beneath his cassock and strolled around the monastery grounds to sharpen his appetite for the evening meal.

It was then that he saw Aspanu Pisciotta drag Turi Guiliano through the monastery gates. The gatekeeper tried to keep them out, but Pisciotta put a pistol to his tonsured head and he fell to his knees to say his last prayers. Pisciotta deposited Guiliano's bloody, almost lifeless, body at the Abbot's feet.

The Abbot was a tall, emaciated man with an elegant monkey-like face, all tiny bones, a nub of a nose and querying little brown buttons for eyes. Though seventy years of age, he was vigorous, his mind as sharp and cunning as in the old days before Mussolini, when he had written elegant ransom notes for Mafia kidnappers who employed him.

Now though it was known to all, peasants and authorities alike, that his monastery was the headquarters of black market operators and smugglers, he was never interfered with in his illegal activities. This out of respect for his holy calling, and a feeling that he deserved some material reward for his spiritual guidance to the community.

So the Abbot Manfredi was not dismayed to find two peasant scoundrels covered with blood breaking into the sacred domain of Saint Francis. In fact, he knew Pisciotta well. He had used the young man in a few smuggling and black market operations. They had in common a sly cunning that delighted them both – one surprised to find it in a man so old and holy, the other to find it in one so young and unworldly.

The Abbot reassured the gatekeeper monk, then said to Pisciotta, "Well, my dear Aspanu, what mischief are you into now?" Pisciotta was tightening the shirt around Guiliano's wound. The Abbot was surprised to see that his face was grief-stricken; he did not think the lad was capable of such emotion.

Pisciotta, seeing again that huge wound, was sure his friend was going to die. And how could he tell the news to Turi's mother and father? He dreaded Maria Lombardo's grief. But for now, a more important scene would have to be played. He must convince the Abbot to give Guiliano sanctuary in the monastery.

He looked the Abbot straight in the eye. He wanted to convey a message that would not be a direct threat but would make the priest understand that if he refused he would make a mortal enemy. "This is my cousin and dearest friend, Salvatore Guiliano," Pisciotta said. "As you can see, he has been unfortunate, and in a short time the National Police will be all over the mountains looking for him. And for me. You are our only hope. I beg you to hide us, and send for a doctor. Do this for me and you have a friend forever." He emphasized the word "friend."

None of this escaped the Abbot. He understood perfectly. He had heard of this young Guiliano, a brave boy well respected in Montelepre, a great shooter and hunter, manlier than his years.

Even the Friends of the Friends had their eyes on him as a possible recruit. The great Don Croce himself, on a social and business visit to the monastery, had mentioned his name to the Abbot as someone it might be profitable to cultivate.

But studying the unconscious Guiliano, he was almost sure that this man would need a grave rather than sanctuary, a priest to administer the last rites rather than a doctor. There was very little risk in granting Pisciotta's request, giving sanctuary to a corpse was not a crime even in Sicily. But he did not want to let this young man know that the favor he was about to do had such little value. He said, "And why are they searching for you?"

Pisciotta hesitated. If the Abbott knew that a policeman was dead he might refuse them sanctuary. But if he were unprepared for the search that was sure to come, he might be surprised into betraying them. He decided to tell the truth. He did so very quickly.

The Abbot lowered his eyes in sorrow for another soul lost to hell and to study closely Guiliano's unconscious form. Blood was leaking through the shirt tied around his body. Perhaps the poor lad would die as they talked, and solve the whole problem.

As a Franciscan monk, the Abbot was filled with Christian charity, but in these terrible times he had to consider the practical and material consequences of his merciful deeds. If he gave sanctuary and the boy died, he could only come out with a profit. The authorities would be satisfied with the corpse, the family would be forever in his debt. If Guiliano recovered, his gratitude might be even more valuable. A man who could, while grievously wounded, still fire his pistol and kill a policeman was a man worth having in your debt.

He could of course deliver both of these rascals to the National Police, who would then make short work of them. But what would be the profit? The authorities could do no more for him than they were doing now. The area in which they held power was already secure to him. It was on the other side of the fence he needed friends. Betraying these youngsters would only earn him enemies among the peasants and the undying hatred of two families. The Abbot was not so foolish as to think his cassock could protect him from the vendetta that would surely follow, and also he had read Pisciotta's mind; this was a young fellow who would go far before he trod the road to hell. No, the hatred of the peasant Sicilian could never be taken lightly. True Christians, they would never shame a statue of the Virgin Mary, but in the hot blood of vendetta they would shotgun the Pope himself for breaking omerta, the ancient code of silence to any authority. In this land with its countless statues of Jesus, there was no belief in the doctrine of turning the other cheek. In this benighted land "forgiveness" was the refuge of the coward. The Sicilian peasant did not know the meaning of mercy.

Of one thing he was sure. Pisciotta would never betray him. In one of their little smuggling deals, the Abbot had arranged for Pisciotta to be arrested and interrogated. The interrogator, a member of the Palermo Security Police, not one of the carabinieri blockheads, had been subtle and then blunt. But neither cunning nor cruelty had moved Pisciotta. He had remained silent. The interrogator released him and assured the Abbot that this was a lad who could be trusted with more important errands. Since then the Abbot had always held a special place in his heart for Aspanu Pisciotta and often said a prayer for his soul.

The Abbot put two fingers in his bony shrunken mouth and whistled. Monks came running and the Abbot instructed them to carry Guiliano into a far wing of the monastery, the Abbot's own special quarters where he had hidden deserters, sons of rich farmers, from the Italian Army during the war. Then he sent one of his monks for the doctor in the village of San Giuseppe Jato, only five miles away.

Pisciotta sat on the bed and held his friend's hand. The wound was no longer bleeding, and Turi Guiliano's eyes were open, but there was a glaze over them. Pisciotta, almost in tears, did not dare to speak. He wiped Guiliano's forehead, which was running with perspiration. There was a blue tinge to the skin.

It was an hour before the doctor arrived and, having observed a horde of carabinieri scouring the mountainside, was not surprised that his friend, the Abbot, was concealing a wounded man. This did not concern him; who cared about the police and government? The Abbot was a fellow Sicilian who needed help. And who always sent him a basket of eggs on Sunday, a barrel of wine for Christmas and a young lamb for Holy Easter.

The doctor examined Guiliano and dressed the wound. The bullet had gone through the belly and probably torn up some vital organs, certainly hit the liver. A great deal of blood had been lost, the young lad had a ghostly pallor, the skin all over his body was bluish white. Around the mouth was that circle of white the doctor knew so well as one of the first signals of death.

He sighed and said to the Abbot, "I've done all I can. The bleeding has stopped, but he's already lost more than a third of his blood, and that's usually fatal. Keep him warm, feed him a little milk and I'll leave you some morphine." He looked down at Guiliano's powerful body with regret.

Pisciotta whispered, "What can I tell his father and mother? Is there a chance for him?"

The doctor sighed. "Tell them what you like. But the wound is mortal. He's a strong-looking lad so he may live a few days more, but it's wise not to hope." He saw the look of despair in Pisciotta's eyes and the fleeting look of relief on the Abbot's face and said with ironic humor, "Of course in this holy place there could always be a miracle."

The Abbot and the doctor went out. Pisciotta leaned over his friend to wipe the sweat from his brow and was astonished that in Guiliano's eyes was a hint of mockery. The eyes were dark brown but edged with a circle of silver. Pisciotta leaned closer. Turi Guiliano was whispering; it was a struggle for him to speak.

"Tell my mother I will come home," Turi said. And then he did something Pisciotta would never forget in the years to follow. His hands came up suddenly and grabbed Pisciotta by the hair of his head. The hands were powerful; they could never be the hands of a dying man. They yanked Pisciotta's head down close. "Obey me," Guiliano said.

The morning after Guiliano's parents called him, Hector Adonis arrived in Montelepre. He rarely used his house in Montelepre. He hated the place of his birth and his young manhood. He especially avoided the Festa. The decorations always distressed him, their brightness seemed to him some evil disguise for the poverty of the town. And he had always endured humiliations during the Festa – drunken men jeering at his short stature, women giving him amused contemptuous smiles.

It did not help that he knew so much more than they did. They were so proud, for instance, that every family painted its house the same color their fathers had. They didn't know that the color of the houses gave away their origins, the blood they had inherited from their ancestors along with their houses. That centuries ago the Normans had painted their houses white, the Greeks always used blue, the Arabs various pinks and red. And the Jews used yellow. Now they all considered themselves Italian and Sicilian. The blood had become so intermingled in a thousand years that you could not identify the owner of a house by his features, and if you told the owner of a yellow house that he had Jewish ancestors you could get a knife in your belly.

Aspanu Pisciotta lived in a white house though he looked more like an Arab. The Guilianos' was predominantly Grecian blue, and Turi Guiliano's face was truly Greek, though he had the body of the lusty large-boned Normans. But apparently all that blood had boiled together into something strange and dangerous to make the true Sicilian, and that was what had brought Adonis to Montelepre today.

The Via Bella was straddled at each corner by a pair of carabinieri, grim faced, holding rifles and machine pistols at the ready. The second day of the Festa was beginning but this part of town was curiously deserted and there were no children on the street. Hector Adonis parked his car in front of the Guiliano house, up on the strip of sidewalk. A pair of carabinieri watched him suspiciously until he got out of the car, then smiled with amusement at his short stature.

It was Pisciotta who opened the door and led him inside. Guiliano's mother and father were in the kitchen waiting, a breakfast of cold sausage, bread and coffee on the table. Maria Lombardo was calm, reassured by her beloved Aspanu that her son would recover. She was more angry than fearful. Guiliano's father looked more proud than sad. His son had proved himself a man; he was alive and his enemy was dead.

Again Pisciotta told his story, this time with comforting humor. He made light of Guiliano's wound and very little of his own heroism in carrying Guiliano down to the monastery. But Hector Adonis knew that helping an injured man over three miles of rough terrain must have been grueling for the slightly built Pisciotta. Also, he thought Pisciotta skipped over the description of the wound too glibly. Adonis feared the worst.

"How did the carabinieri know enough to come here?" he asked. Pisciotta told him about Guiliano giving up his identity card.

Guiliano's mother broke out in lamentation. "Why didn't Turi let them have the cheese? Why did he fight?"

Guiliano's father said harshly to his wife, "What would you have him do? Inform on that poor farmer? He would have disgraced the family name forever."

Hector Adonis was struck by the contradiction in these remarks. He knew the mother was much stronger and more fiery than the father. Yet the mother had uttered the words of resignation, the father the words of defiance. And Pisciotta, this boy Aspanu – who would have thought he would be so brave, to rescue his comrade and bring him to safety? And now lying so coolly to the parents about the hurt their son had suffered.

Guiliano's father said, "If only he had not given up his identity card. Our friends would have sworn he was in the streets here."

Guiliano's mother said, "They would have arrested him anyway." She began to weep. "Now he will have to live in the mountains."

Hector Adonis said, "We must make certain the Abbot does not deliver him to the police."

Pisciotta said impatiently, "He will not dare. He knows I'll hang him in his cassock."

Adonis gave Pisciotta a long look. There was a deadly menace in this young boy. It was not intelligent to damage the ego of a young man, Adonis thought. The police never understood that you can, with some impunity, insult an older man who has already been humiliated by life itself and will not take to heart the small slights of another human being. But a young man thinks these offenses mortal.

They were looking for help to Hector Adonis, who had helped their son in the past. Hector said, "If the police learn his whereabouts, the Abbot will have no choice. He is not above suspicion himself in certain matters. I think it best, with your permission, to ask my friend, Don Croce Malo, to intercede with the Abbot."

They were surprised that he knew the great Don, except for Pisciotta, who gave him a knowing smile. Adonis said to him sharply, "And what are you doing here? You'll be recognized and arrested. They have your description."

Pisciotta said contemptuously, "The two guards were scared shitless. They wouldn't recognize their mothers. And I have a dozen witnesses who will swear I was in Montelepre yesterday."

Hector Adonis adopted his most imposing professional manner. He said to the parents, "You must not attempt to visit your son or tell anyone, even your dearest friends, where he is. The police have informers and spies everywhere. Aspanu will visit Turi at night. As soon as he can move I'll make arrangements for him to live in another town until this all quiets down. Then, with some money, things can be arranged, and Turi can come home. Don't worry about him, Maria, guard your health. And you, Aspanu, keep me informed."

He embraced the mother and father. Maria Lombardo was still weeping when he left.

He had many things to do – most importantly to get word to Don Croce and make sure that Turi's sanctuary remained safe. Thank God the government in Rome did not offer rewards for information on the murder of a policeman, or the Abbot would have sold Turi as quickly as he sold one of his holy relics.

Turi Guiliano lay on the bed without moving. He had heard the doctor pronounce his wound mortal, but he could not believe he was dying. His body seemed suspended in air, free of pain and fear. He could never die. He did not know that great loss of blood produces euphoria.

During the days, one of the monks tended him, fed him milk. Evenings, the Abbot came with the doctor. Pisciotta visited him in the night and held his hand and nursed him through the long evil hours of darkness. At the end of two weeks, the doctor proclaimed a miracle.

Turi Guiliano had willed his body to heal, to materialize the lost blood, to meld together the vital organs that had been torn by the steel-jacketed bullet. And in the euphoria inspired by the draining of the blood from his body he dreamed of future glory. He felt a new freedom, that he could no longer be held accountable for anything he did from this time on. That the laws of society, the stricter Sicilian laws of family, could no longer bind him. That he was free to commit any act; that his bloody wound made him innocent. And all this because a foolish carabiniere had shot him over a piece of cheese.

For the weeks of his convalescence, he played over and over in his mind the days he and his fellow villagers had congregated in the town square waiting for the gabellotti, the overseers of the large land estates, to pick them out for a day's work, offering starvation wages with the contemptuous take-it-or-leave-it sneer of men who had all the power. The unfair sharing of crops that left everyone impoverished after a year's hard work. The overbearing hand of the law which punished the poor and let the rich go free.

If he recovered from his wound, he swore he would see justice done. He would never again be a powerless boy at the mercy of fate. He would arm himself, physically and mentally. Of one thing he was sure: He would never again stand helpless before the world, as he had before Guido Quintana, and the policeman who had shot him down. The young man who had been Turi Guiliano no longer existed.

At the end of a month, the doctor advised another four weeks of rest with some exercise, and so Guiliano donned a monk's habit and strolled around the grounds of the monastery. The Abbot had become fond of the young man, and often accompanied him, telling stories about his youthful travels to far-off lands. The Abbot's affection was not lessened when Hector Adonis sent him a sum of money for his prayers for the poor and Don Croce himself advised the Abbot that he had an interest in the young man.

As for Guiliano, he was astonished at how these monks lived. In a countryside where people were almost starving, where laborers had to sell their sweat for fifty cents a day, the monks of Saint Francis lived like kings. The monastery was really a huge and rich estate.

They had a lemon orchard, a scattering of stout olive trees as old as Christ. They had a small bamboo plantation and a butcher shop into which they fed their flock of sheep, their pen of piglets. Chickens and turkeys roamed at will, crowds of them. The monks ate meat every day with their spaghetti, drank homemade wine from their own huge cellar, and traded on the black market for tobacco, which they smoked like fiends.

But they worked hard. During the day they labored barefoot in cassocks tucked up to their knees, sweat pouring down their brows. On their tonsured heads, to protect them from the sun, they wore oddly shaped American fedoras, black and brown, which the Abbot had acquired from some military government supply officer for a cask of wine. The monks wore the fedoras in many different styles, some with the brims snapped down, gangster style, others with the brims flapped upward all around to form gutters in which they kept their cigarettes. The Abbot had come to hate these hats and had forbidden their use except when actually working in the fields.

For the second four weeks, Guiliano was a fellow monk. To the Abbot's astonishment he worked hard in the fields and helped the older monks carry the heavy baskets of fruit and olives back to the storage shed. As he grew well, Guiliano enjoyed the work, enjoyed showing off his strength. They piled his baskets high and he never let his knees buckle. The Abbot was proud of him and told him he could stay as long as he liked, that he had the makings of a true man of God.

Turi Guiliano was happy that four weeks. He had after all returned from the dead in body and in his head he was weaving daydreams and miracles. And he enjoyed the old Abbot, who treated him with absolute trust and revealed the secrets of the monastery to him. The old man boasted that all the products of the monastery were sold directly on the black market, not turned over to the government warehouses. Except for the wine, which was swilled down by the monks themselves. At night there was a great deal of gambling and drunkenness, and even women were smuggled in, but to all this the Abbot closed his eyes. "These are hard times," he said to Guiliano. "The promised reward of heaven is too far away, men must have some pleasure now. God will forgive them."

One rainy afternoon, the Abbot showed Turi another wing of the monastery which was used as a warehouse. This was overflowing with holy relics manufactured by a skilled team of old monks. The Abbot, like any shopkeeper, bewailed hard times. "Before the war, we had a very good business," he sighed. "This warehouse was never more than half full. And just look what sacred treasures we have here. A bone from the fish multiplied by Christ. The staff carried by Moses on his way to the Promised Land." He paused to watch Guiliano's astonished face with amused satisfaction. Then his bony face contorted into a wicked grin. Kicking a huge pile of wooden sticks, he said almost gleefully, "This used to be our best item. Hundreds of pieces of the cross on which our Lord was crucified. And in this bin are fragments of any saint you can name. There isn't a household in Sicily that doesn't have the bone of a saint. And locked away in a special storeroom we have thirteen arms of Saint Andrew, three heads of John the Baptist and seven suits of armor worn by Joan of Arc. In the winter, our monks travel far and wide to sell these treasures."

Turi Guiliano was laughing now and the Abbot smiled at him. But Guiliano was thinking how the poor were always deceived, even by those who pointed the road to salvation. It was another important fact to remember.

The Abbot showed him a huge tub full of medallions blessed by the Cardinal of Palermo, thirty shrouds that Jesus wore when he died, and two black Virgin Marys. That stopped Turi Guiliano's laughter. He told the Abbot about the black Virgin statue owned by his mother and so treasured by her since she was a little girl; that it had been in her family for generations. Could it possibly be a forgery? The Abbot patted him kindly on the shoulder and told him the monastery had been making replicas for over a hundred years carved from good olive wood. But he assured Guiliano that even the replicas had value, since only a few were made.

The Abbot saw no harm confiding in a murderer such venial sins of holy men. Still Guiliano's disapproving silence disturbed the Abbot. Defensively, he said, "Remember that we men who devote our lives to God must also live in the material world of men who do not believe in waiting for their rewards in heaven. We too have families and must aid and protect them. Many of our monks are poor and come from the poor, who we know are the salt of the earth. We cannot permit our sisters and brothers, our nephews and cousins to starve in these hard times. The Holy Church itself needs our help, must defend itself against powerful enemies. The Communists and Socialists, those misguided liberals, must be fought against, and that takes money. What a comfort to Mother Church are the faithful! Their need for our holy relics supplies the money to crush the infidels and fills a need in their own souls. If we did not supply them they would waste their money on gambling and wine and shameful women. Don't you agree?"

Guiliano nodded, but he was smiling. It was dazzling for one so young to meet such a master of hypocrisy. The Abbot was irritated by that smile; he had expected a more gracious response from a murderer to whom he had given sanctuary and nursed back from the gate of death. Grateful respect dictated a properly hypocritical response of the utmost sincerity. This smuggler, this murderer, this peasant, Master Turi Guiliano, should show himself more understanding, more a Christian. The Abbot said sternly, "Remember our true faith rests on our belief in miracles."

"Yes," Guiliano said. "And I know with all my heart that it is your duty to help us find them." He said it without malice, in a spirit of fun, with a sincere good will to please his benefactor. But it was all he could do to keep from laughing outright.

The Abbot was pleased and all his affection returned. This was a fine fellow, he had enjoyed his company the past few months, and it was comforting to know that the man was deeply in his debt. And he would not be ungrateful; he had already shown a noble heart. He expressed in word and deed, every day, his respect and gratitude to the Abbot. He did not have the hard heart of an outlaw. What would happen to such a man in this present-day Sicily, full of informers, poverty, bandits, and sundry sinners? Ah, well, the Abbot thought, a man who has murdered once can do it again, in a pinch. The Abbot decided that Don Croce should counsel Turi Guiliano on the right path to life.

One day, while resting on his bed, Turi Guiliano had a strange visitor. The Abbot presented him as Father Beniamino Malo, a very dear friend, then left them alone together.

Father Beniamino said solicitously, "My dear young man, I hope you have recovered from your wound. The Holy Abbot tells me it was truly a miracle."

Guiliano said politely, "God's mercy." And Father Beniamino bowed his head as if he himself had received that benediction.

Guiliano studied him. This was a priest who had never labored in the fields. His cassock was too clean at the hem, his face too puffily white, his hands too soft. But the countenance was holy enough; it was meek and had a Christlike resignation, a Christian humility.

The voice too was soft and gentle when Father Beniamino said, "My son, I will hear your confession and give you Holy Communion. Shriven of sin, you can go out into the world with a pure heart."

Turi Guiliano studied this priest who wielded such sublime power. "Forgive me, Father," he said. "I am not yet in a state of contrition and it would be false of me to make a confession at this time. But thank you for your blessing."

The priest nodded and said, "Yes, that would compound your sins. But I have another offer that is perhaps more practical in this world. My brother, Don Croce, has sent me to ask if you would like to take refuge with him in Villaba. You would be paid a good wage, and of course, as you must know, the authorities would never dare molest you while you are under his protection."

Guiliano was astonished that word of his deed had reached such a man as Don Croce. He knew he had to be careful. He detested the Mafia, and did not wish to be caught in their web.

"This is a very great honor," he said. "I thank you and your brother. But I must consult with my family, I must honor the wishes of my parents. So for now permit me to refuse your kind offer."

He saw the priest was surprised. Who in Sicily would refuse the protection of the great Don? So he added, "Perhaps in a few weeks, I will think differently and come to see you in Villaba."

Father Beniamino had recovered. He raised his hands in benediction. "Go with God, my son," he said. "You will always be welcome in my brother's house." He made the sign of the cross and left.

Turi Guiliano knew it was time to leave. When Aspanu Pisciotta came to visit that evening Guiliano instructed him on what preparations to make for his return to the outside world. He saw that as he had changed, so had his friend. Pisciotta did not flinch or make any protest at receiving orders that he knew would profoundly alter his life. Finally Guiliano told him, "Aspanu, you can come with me or you can remain with your family. Do what you feel you must do."

Pisciotta smiled. "Do you think I'm going to let you have all the fun and glory? Let you play in the mountains while I bring donkeys out to work and pick olives? And what about our friendship? Am I to let you live in the mountains alone when we have played and worked together since we were children? Only when you return to Montelepre in freedom will I return there too. So no more foolish talk. I'll come to get you in four days. It will take a little time to do all you want me to do."

Pisciotta was busy those four days. He had already tracked down the smuggler on horseback who had offered to go after the wounded Guiliano. His name was Marcuzzi, and he was a feared man and a large-scale smuggler operating under the protection of Don Croce and Guido Quintana. He had an uncle of the same name who was a great Mafia chief.

Pisciotta discovered that Marcuzzi made regular trips from Montelepre to Castellammare. Pisciotta knew the farmer who kept the smuggler's mules, and when he saw the animals taken out of the fields and brought to a barn near the town, he gambled that Marcuzzi was making a trip the next day. At dawn Pisciotta stationed himself along the road that he knew Marcuzzi had to take, and waited for him. He had a lupara, which many Sicilian families owned as part of their household equipment. Indeed, the deadly Sicilian shotgun was so common and so often used for assassination that when Mussolini cleaned out the Mafia, he had ordered all stone walls to be knocked down to at most three feet in height so that murderers could not use the walls as ambush points.

He had decided to kill Marcuzzi not only because the smuggler had offered to help the police kill the wounded Guiliano, but because he had also boasted of it to his friends. By killing the smuggler he would give warning to any others who might betray Guiliano. Also he needed the weapons he knew Marcuzzi carried.

He did not have to wait long. Because Marcuzzi was leading empty mules to pick up black market goods in Castellammare, he was careless. He rode his lead mule down a mountain trail with his rifle slung over his shoulder, instead of at the ready. When he saw Pisciotta standing in the trail in front of him, he was not alarmed. All he saw was a short slender boy with a thin dandyish mustache who was smiling in a way that irritated him. It was only when Pisciotta swung the lupara out from beneath his jacket that Marcuzzi paid full attention.

He said gruffly, "You've got me going the wrong way. I haven't picked up my goods yet. And these mules are under the protection of the Friends of the Friends. Be clever and find yourself another customer."

Pisciotta said softly, "I only want your life." He smiled cruelly. "There was a day you wanted to be a hero for the police. Just a few months ago, do you remember?"

Marcuzzi remembered. He turned the mule sideways, as if by accident, to shield his hand from Pisciotta's gaze. He slid his hand into his belt and drew his pistol. At the same time he yanked on the mule's bridle to bring himself around in a shooting position. The last thing he saw was Pisciotta's smile as the lupara blasted his body out of the saddle and flung it into the dust.

With grim satisfaction Pisciotta stood over the body and fired another blast into the head, then took the pistol still in Marcuzzi's hand and the rifle wrapped on the body by its sling. He emptied the man's jacket pocket of rifle bullets and put them into his own. Then quickly and methodically he shot each of the four mules, a warning to anyone who might help the enemies of Guiliano, even indirectly. He stood on the road, his lupara in his arms, the dead man's rifle slung over his shoulder, the pistol in his waistband. He felt no sense of pity and his ferocity pleased him. For despite his love for his friend they had always striven against each other in many ways. And though he acknowledged Turi as his chief, he always felt he had to prove his claim to their friendship by being as courageous and as clever. Now he too had stepped out of the magic circle of boyhood, of society, and joined Turi on the outside of that circle. With this act he had bound himself forever to Turi Guiliano.

Two days later, just before the evening meal, Guiliano left the monastery. He embraced all of the monks as they gathered in the eating hall and thanked them for their kindnesses. The monks were sorry to see him go. True, he had never attended their religious rites, and had not made a confession and act of contrition for the murder he had committed, but some of these monks had started their manhood with similar crimes and were not judgmental.

The Abbot escorted Guiliano to the gate of the monastery where Pisciotta was waiting. He presented him with a going-away gift. It was a statue of the black Virgin Mary, a duplicate of the one owned by Maria Lombardo, Guiliano's mother. Pisciotta had an American green duffel bag and Guiliano put the black Virgin statuette into it.

Pisciotta watched with a sardonic eye as the Abbot and Guiliano said their goodbyes. He knew the Abbot to be a smuggler, a secret member of the Friends of the Friends, and a slave-driving taskmaster with his poor monks. So he could not understand the sentimentality of the Abbot's farewell. It did not occur to Pisciotta that the love and affection and respect that Guiliano inspired in him he could also inspire in as powerful and as old a man as the Abbot.

Though the Abbot's affection was genuine, it was tinged with self-interest. He knew this boy might one day become a force to reckon with in Sicily. It was like spotting the trace of godliness. As for Turi Guiliano, he was genuinely grateful. The Abbot had saved his life, but more than that, had instructed him in many things and had been a delightful companion. The Abbot had even let him have the use of his library. Curiously, Guiliano had affection for the Abbot's chicanery; it seemed to him a nice balance to strike in life, the doing of good without doing great visible harm, the balancing of power to make life go smoothly.

The Abbot and Turi Guiliano embraced each other. Turi said, "I am in your debt. Remember me when you need help of any kind. Whatever you ask, I must do."

The Abbot patted his shoulder. "Christian charity does not require repayment," he said. "Return to the ways of God, my son, and pay his tribute." But he was speaking by rote. He knew well this kind of innocence in the young. Out of it a devil could rise in flames to do his bidding. He would remember Guiliano's promise.

Guiliano shouldered the duffel bag despite Pisciotta's protest, and they walked through the monastery gate together. They never looked back.

CHAPTER 6

From a jutting cliff edge near the top of Monte d'Ora, Guiliano and Pisciotta could look down on the town of Montelepre. Only a few miles below them, the house lights were coming on to fight the falling darkness. Guiliano even imagined he could hear the music coming from the loudspeakers in the square, which always played Rome radio station broadcasts to serenade the town's strollers before their evening meal.

But the mountain air was deceiving. It would take two hours to make his way down to the town and four hours to get back up. Guiliano and Pisciotta had played here as children; they knew every rock on this mountain and every cave and every tunnel. Further back on this cliff was the Grotta Bianca, the favorite cave of their childhood, bigger than any house in Montelepre.

Aspanu had followed his orders well, Turi Guiliano thought. The cave was stocked with sleeping bags, cooking pans, boxes of ammunition and sacks of food and bread. There was a wooden box holding flashlights, lanterns and knives, and there were also some cans of kerosene. He laughed. "Aspanu, we can live up here forever."

"For a few days," Aspanu said. "This is the first place the carabinieri came when they went looking for you."

"The cowards only look in daylight," Turi answered. "We are safe at night."

A great cloak of darkness had fallen over the mountains, but the sky was so full of stars that they could see each other clearly. Pisciotta opened the duffel bag and started pulling out weapons and clothes. Slowly and ceremonially, Turi Guiliano armed himself. Taking off his monk's cassock, he donned the moleskin trousers, then the huge sheepskin jacket with its many pockets. He put two pistols in his waistband and strapped the machine pistol inside the jacket so it could be covered and yet swung into action immediately. He buckled an ammunition belt around his waist and put extra boxes of bullets in the jacket pockets. Pisciotta handed him a knife, which he put in the army boots he had drawn on. Then another small pistol, which fit into a string holster tied into the inside of the collar flap of the sheepskin jacket. He checked all the guns and ammunition carefully.

The rifle he carried openly, its sling over his shoulder. Finally he was ready. He smiled at Pisciotta, who carried only a lupara out in the open and his knife in a holster at his back. Pisciotta said, "I feel naked. Can you walk with all that iron on your body? If you fall down I'll never be able to lift you up."

Guiliano was still smiling, the secret smile of a child who believes he has the world at bay. The huge scar on his body ached with the weight of the weapons and ammunition, but he welcomed that ache. It gave him absolution. "I'm ready to see my family or meet my enemies," he said to Pisciotta. The two young men started down the long winding path from the top of Monte d'Ora to the town of Montelepre below.

They walked below a vault of stars. Armed against death and his fellow man, drinking in the smell of far-off lemon orchards and wild flowers, Turi Guiliano felt a serenity he had never known. He was no longer helpless against some random foe. He no longer had to entertain the enemy within himself that doubted his courage. If he had willed himself not to die, had willed his torn body to knit together, he now believed that he could make his body do this over and over again. He no longer doubted that he had some magnificent destiny before him. He shared the magic of those medieval heroes who could not die until they came to the end of their long story, until they had achieved their great victories.

He would never leave these mountains, these olive trees, this Sicily. He had only a vague idea of what his future glory would be, but he never doubted that glory. He would never again be a poor peasant youth going in fear of the carabinieri, the judges, the pulverizing corruption of law.

They were coming down out of the mountains now and onto the roads that lead to Montelepre. They passed a padlocked roadside shrine of the Virgin Mary and child, the blue plaster robes shining like the sea in moonlight. The smell of the orchards filled the air with a sweetness that made Guiliano almost dizzy. He saw Pisciotta stoop and pick a prickly pear made sweet by the night air, and he felt a love for this friend who had saved his life, a love with its root in their childhood spent together. He wanted to share his immortality with him. It was never their fate to die two nameless peasants on a mountainside in Sicily. In a great exuberance of spirit Guiliano called out, "Aspanu, Aspanu, I believe, I believe," and started running down the final slope of the mountain, out of the ghostly white rocks, past the holy shrines of Christ and martyred saints standing in padlocked boxes. Pisciotta ran beside him, laughing, and they raced together into the arc of moonlight that showered the road to Montelepre.

The mountains ended in a hundred yards of green pasture that led to the back walls formed by the houses on the Via Bella. Behind these walls, each house had its garden of tomatoes, and some, a lonely olive or lemon tree. The gate to the Guiliano garden fence was unlocked, and the two young men slipped through quietly and found Guiliano's mother waiting for them. She rushed into Turi Guiliano's arms, the tears streaming down her face. She kissed him fiercely and whispered, "My beloved son, my beloved son," and Turi Guiliano found himself standing in the moonlight not responding to her love for the first time in his life.

It was now nearly midnight, the moon still bright, and they hurried into the house to escape observation by spies. The windows were shuttered, and relatives of the Guiliano and Pisciotta families had been posted along all the streets to warn of police patrols. In the house Guiliano's friends and family waited to celebrate his homecoming. A feast worthy of Holy Easter had been laid out. They had this one night with him before Turi went to live in the mountains.

Guiliano's father embraced him and slapped him on the back to show his approval. His two sisters were there, and Hector Adonis. Also there was a neighbor, a woman called La Venera. She was a widow of about thirty-five. Her husband had been a famous bandit named Candeleria, who had been betrayed, then ambushed by the police, only a year ago. She had become a close friend of Guiliano's mother, but Turi was surprised that she was present at this reunion. Only his mother could have invited her. For a moment he wondered why.

They ate and drank and treated Turi Guiliano as if he had returned from a long holiday in foreign countries. But then his father wanted to see his wound. Guiliano lifted his shirt out of his trousers and revealed the great flaming scar, the tissue around it still blue-black from the trauma of the gunshot. His mother broke into lamentations. Guiliano said to her with a smile, "Would you rather have seen me in prison with the marks of the bastinado? "

Though the familiar scene duplicated the happiest days of his childhood, he felt a great distance from them all. There were all his favorite dishes, the inky squid, the fat macaroni with its herbed sauce of tomato, the roasted lamb, the great bowl of olives, green and red salad doused with the pure first pressing of olive oil, bamboo-covered bottles of Sicilian wine. Everything from the earth of Sicily. His mother and father told their fairy tales about life in America. And Hector Adonis regaled them on the glories of the history of Sicily. Of Garibaldi and his famous Redshirts. Of the day of the Sicilian Vespers, when the people of Sicily had risen to slaughter the French occupying army so many hundreds of years ago. All the tales of Sicily oppressed starting with Rome, followed by the Moors and Normans and the French and the Germans and the Spanish. Woe was Sicily! Never free, its people always hungry, their labor sold so cheap, their blood spilled so easily.

And so now there was not a Sicilian who believed in government, in law, in the structured order of society which had always been used to turn them into beasts of burden. Guiliano had listened to these stories through the years, imprinting them on his brain. But only now did Guiliano realize that he could change this.

He watched Aspanu smoking a cigarette over his coffee. Even at this joyful reunion, Aspanu had an ironic smile on his lips. Guiliano could tell what he was thinking and what he would say later: All you have to do is to be stupid enough to get shot by a policeman, commit murder, become an outlaw, and then your loved ones will show their affection and treat you like a saint from heaven. And yet Aspanu was the only one he did not feel cut off from.

And then there was the woman. La Venera. Why had his mother invited her, and why did she come? He saw that her face was still handsome, bold and strong with jet-black eyebrows and lips so dark and red that they seemed almost purple in this smoky curtained light. There was no way to tell what her figure was like, for she wore the Sicilian widow's shapeless black dress.

Turi Guiliano had to tell them the whole story of the shooting at the Four Crossroads. His father, a little drunk with wine, emitted growls of approval at the death of the policeman. His mother was silent. His father told the story of how the farmer had come looking for his donkey and his own remark to the farmer: "Stay content you have lost a donkey. I have lost a son."

Aspanu said, "A donkey looking for a donkey."

They all laughed. Guiliano's father went on: "When the farmer heard that a policeman was killed he was too afraid to make his claim, that he might be bastinado ed."

Turi said, "He will be repaid."

Finally Hector Adonis outlined his plans to save Turi. The family of the dead man would be paid an indemnity. Guiliano's parents would have to mortgage their little piece of land to raise the money. Adonis himself would contribute a sum. But this tactic would have to wait until feelings of anger had died down. The influence of the great Don Croce would be brought to bear on government officials and the family of the slain man. After all it had been more or less an accident. There had been no real ill will on either side. A farce could be played out as long as the victim's family and key government officials cooperated. The only drawback was the identity card at the scene of the killing. But in a year's time Don Croce could cause that to vanish from the prosecutor's files. Most important, Turi Guiliano must remain out of trouble for that year. He must disappear into the mountains.

Turi Guiliano listened to them all patiently, smiling, nodding his head, not showing his irritation. They still thought of him as he had been at Festa time over two months ago. He had taken off his sheepskin jacket and stripped himself of arms; his guns lay at his feet beneath the table. But that had not impressed them, nor the ugly huge scar. They could not imagine how his mind had been torn apart by that great blow to his body, or that he would never again be the young man they had known.

In this house, he was for this moment safe. Trusted people patrolled the streets and watched the carabinieri barracks to give him warning of any attack. The house itself, built many hundreds of years ago, was made of stone; its windows had heavy wooden shutters locked and a foot thick. The wooden door was strong and iron barred. Not a chink of light could escape this house, no enemy could force his way in quickly in a surprise attack. And yet Turi Guiliano felt himself in danger.

These loved ones would trap him into his former life, persuade him to become a peasant farmer, to lay down his arms against his fellow men and leave him helpless to their laws. At that moment he knew that he would have to be cruel to those he loved most. It had always been the young man's dream to acquire love rather than power. But that was all changed. He now saw clearly that power came first.

He spoke gently to Hector Adonis and to the others. "Dear godfather, I know you speak out of affection and concern. But I can't let my mother and father lose their little bit of land to help me out of my trouble. And all of you here, don't worry so much about me. I'm a grown man who must pay for his carelessness. And I won't have anyone paying an indemnity for that carabinier e I shot. Remember, he tried to kill me just because I was smuggling a bit of cheese. I would never have fired at him except that I thought I was dying and wanted to even the score. But all that's past. I won't be so easy to shoot the next time." Pisciotta said with a grin, "It's more fun in the mountains anyway."

But Guiliano's mother was not to be distracted. They could all see her panic, the fear in her burning eyes. She said desperately, "Don't become a bandit, don't rob poor people who have enough misery in their lives. Don't become an outlaw. Let La Venera tell you what kind of life her husband lived."

La Venera raised her head and looked directly at Guiliano. He was struck by the sensuality in her face, as if she were trying to attract his passion toward her. Her eyes were bold and stared at him almost in invitation. Before he had thought of her only as an older woman; now he felt her sexually.

When she spoke her voice was husky with emotion. She said, "In those same mountains you wish to go to my husband had to live like an animal. Always in fear. Always. He could not eat. He could not sleep. When we were in bed together every little noise would make him jump. We slept with guns on the floor beside the bed. But that didn't help him. When our daughter was ill, he tried to visit her, and they were waiting for him. They knew he was softhearted. He was shot down like a dog in the streets. They stood over him and laughed in my face."

Guiliano could see the grin on Pisciotta's face. The great bandit, Candeleria, softhearted? He had massacred six men as suspected informers, preyed on wealthy farmers, extorted money from poor peasants, struck terror into a whole countryside. But his wife saw him differently.

La Venera did not notice Pisciotta's smile. She went on: "I buried him and then buried my child a week later. They said it was pneumonia. But I know her heart was broken. What I remember most was when I visited him in the mountains. He was always cold and hungry, and sometimes ill. He would have given anything to return to the life of an honest peasant. But worst of all, his heart became as hard as an olive pit. He was no longer human, may he rest in peace. So, dear Turi, don't be so proud. We will help you in your misfortune, don't become what my husband was before he died."

Everyone was silent. Pisciotta was no longer smiling. Guiliano's father murmured that he would be glad to be rid of the farm; he could sleep late mornings. Hector Adonis was staring down at the tablecloth, frowning. None of them spoke.

The silence was broken by a quick tapping on the door, a signal from one of the watchers. Pisciotta went to speak to the man. When he came back he made a signal for Guiliano to arm himself. "The carabinieri barracks are blazing with light," he said. "And there is a police van blocking the end of the Via Bella where it enters the town square. They are getting ready to raid this house." He paused for a moment. "We must be quick with our goodbyes."

What struck everyone was the calmness with which Turi Guiliano prepared his escape. His mother rushed into his arms and as he embraced her he already had his sheepskin jacket in his hands. He said his goodbyes to the others and in the next instant seemed to be fully armed, his jacket on, his rifle slung. And yet he had not moved quickly or hurriedly. He stood there for a moment smiling at them and then said to Pisciotta, "You can stay and meet me in the mountains later, or you can come with me now." Wordlessly Pisciotta moved to the back door and opened it.

Guiliano gave his mother a final embrace, and she kissed him fiercely and said, "Hide, don't do anything rash. Let us help you." But he was already out of her arms.

Pisciotta was leading the way, across the fields to the beginning slopes of the mountains. Guiliano whistled sharply and Pisciotta stopped and let Turi catch up to him. The way was clear to the mountains, and his watchers had told him there were no police patrols in that direction. They would be safe in the Grotta Bianca after a four-hour climb. If the carabinieri chased them through the darkness, it would be an extraordinary act of bravery and foolishness.

Guiliano said, "Aspanu, how many men do the carabinieri have in their garrison?"

"Twelve," Pisciotta said. "And the Maresciallo."

Guiliano laughed. "Thirteen is an unlucky number. And why are we running away from so few?" He paused for a moment and then said, "Follow me."

He led the way back through the fields so that they entered the town of Montelepre further down the street. Then across the Via Bella so that they could watch the Guiliano house from the safety of a dark narrow alley. They crouched in the shadows waiting.

Five minutes later they could hear a jeep rattling down the Via Bella. Six carabinieri were crammed into it including the Maresciallo himself. Two of the men immediately went through the side street to block the back entrance. The Maresciallo and three of his men went up to the door and hammered on it. At the same time a small covered truck pulled up behind the jeep and two more carabinieri, rifles ready, jumped out to command the street.

Turi Guiliano watched all this with interest. The police raid was based on the assumption that the targets would never be in a position to launch a counterattack; that their only alternative would be to run from a superior force. Turi Guiliano at that moment made it a basic principle always to be in a position to counterattack when he was being hunted, no matter how great the odds, or perhaps the greater the odds the better.

This was Guiliano's first tactical operation and he was astonished at how easily he could command the situation if he chose to shed blood. True, he could not shoot at the Maresciallo and the three men at the door since the bullets might go into the house and hit his family. But he could easily slaughter the two men commanding the street and the two drivers in their vehicles. If he wished, he could do this as soon as the Maresciallo and his men were in the Guiliano house. They would not dare come out, and he and Pisciotta could make their way through the fields at their leisure. As for the police blocking the end of the street with their van, they would be too far out of the way to be a factor. They would not have the initiative to come up the street without receiving orders.

But at this point he had no desire to shed blood. It was still an intellectual maneuver. And he particularly wanted to see the Maresciallo in action, since this was the man who would be his principal opponent in the future.

At that moment the door of the house was being opened by Guiliano's father, and the Maresciallo took the old man roughly by the arm and thrust him out into the street with a shouted order to wait there.

A Maresciallo of the Italian carabinieri is the highest ranking noncommissioned officer of the National Police force and usually is the commander of a small town detachment. As such he is an important member of the local community and treated with the same respect as the local Mayor and priest of the parish. So he was not expecting the greeting from Guiliano's mother when she barred his way and spit on the ground in front of him to show her contempt. He and his three men had to force their way into the house and search it while being scathingly abused and cursed by Guiliano's mother. Everyone was taken out into the street to be questioned; the neighboring houses emptied of their women and men who also verbally abused the police.

When the search of the house proved fruitless, the Maresciallo attempted to question the inhabitants. Guiliano's father was astonished. "Do you think I would inform on my own son?" he asked the Maresciallo, and a great roar of approval came from the crowd in the streets. The Maresciallo ordered the Guiliano family back into their house.

In the shadow of their alley, Pisciotta said to Guiliano, "Lucky for them your mother doesn't have our weapons." But Turi didn't answer. The blood had rushed to his head. It took an enormous effort to control himself. The Maresciallo lashed out with his club and hit a man in the crowd who dared to protest the rough treatment of Guiliano's parents. Two other carabinieri began grabbing citizens of Montelepre at random and throwing them into the waiting truck, kicking and clubbing them on their way, ignoring their cries of fear and protest.

Suddenly there was one man standing alone on the street facing the carabinieri. He lunged at the Maresciallo. A shot rang out, and the man fell to the cobblestones. From one of the houses a woman began to scream and then she ran out and threw her body over her fallen husband. Turi Guiliano recognized her; she was an old friend of his family who always brought his mother freshly baked Easter cake.

Turi tapped Pisciotta on the shoulder and whispered, "Follow me," and started running down the narrow crooked streets toward the central square of the town, at the other end of the Via Bella.

Pisciotta yelled fiercely, "What the hell are you doing?" but then fell silent. For he suddenly knew exactly what Turi had in mind. The truck full of prisoners would have to go down the Via Bella to turn around and make its run back to the Bellampo Barracks.

As he ran down the dark parallel street, Turi Guiliano felt invisible, godlike. He knew the enemy would never dream, could never even imagine, what he was doing, that they thought he was running for safety in the mountains. He felt a wild elation. They would learn they could not raid his mother's home with impunity, they would think twice before doing it again. They could not again shoot a man in cold blood. He would make them show respect for his neighbors and his family.

He reached the far side of the square, and in the light of its single streetlamp he could see the police van blocking the entrance into the Via Bella. As if he could have been caught in such a trap. What could they have been thinking of? Was that a sample of official cleverness? He switched to another side street to bring him to the back entrance of the church that dominated the square, Pisciotta following him. Inside, they both vaulted the altar rail and then both stopped for a fraction of a second on the holy stage where long ago they had performed as altar boys and served their priest while he was giving the people of Montelepre Sunday Mass and Communion. Holding their guns at the ready they genuflected and crossed themselves clumsily; for a moment the power of the wax statues of Christ crowned with thorns, the gilded chalky blue-robed Virgin Marys, the batteries of saints blunted their lust for battle. Then they were running up the short aisle to the great oaken door that gave a field of fire to the square. And there they knelt again to prepare their weapons.

The van blocking the Via Bella backed off to let the truck with the arrested men enter the square to make its circle and go back up the street. At that moment Turi Guiliano pushed open the church door and said to Pisciotta, "Fire over their heads." At the same moment he fired his machine pistol into the blocking van, aiming at the tires and the engine. Suddenly the square flamed with light as the engine blew up and the van caught fire. The two carabinieri in the front seat tumbled out like loose-jointed puppets, their surprise not giving their bodies time to tighten against the shock. Beside him Pisciotta was firing his rifle at the cab of the truck holding the prisoners. Turi Guiliano saw the driver leap out and fall still. The other armed carabinieri jumped out and Pisciotta fired again. The second policeman went down. Turi turned to Pisciotta to reproach him but suddenly the stained glass windows of the church shattered with machine gun fire and the colored bits scattered on the church floor like rubies. Turi realized that there was no longer any possibility of mercy. That Aspanu was right. They must kill or be killed.

Guiliano pulled Pisciotta's arm and ran back through the church and out the back door and through the dark crooked streets of Montelepre. He knew that tonight there was no hope of helping the prisoners to escape. They slipped through the final wall of the town over the open fields and kept running until they were safely into the rising slopes covered with huge white stones. Dawn was breaking when they reached the top of Monte d'Ora in the Cammarata Mountains.

Over a thousand years ago Spartacus had hidden his slave army here and led them out to fight the Roman legions. Standing on the top of this Monte d'Ora watching the sun come radiantly alive, Turi Guiliano was filled with youthful glee that he had escaped his enemies. He would never obey a fellow human being again. He would choose who should live and who should die, and there was no doubt in his mind that all he would do would be for the glory and freedom of Sicily, for good and not for evil. That he would only strike for the cause of justice, to help the poor. That he would win every battle, that he would win the love of the oppressed.

He was twenty years old.

CHAPTER 7

Don Croce Malo was born in the village of Villaba, a little mudhole he was to make prosperous and famous all through Sicily. It was not ironic, to Sicilians, that he sprang from a religious family who groomed him for priesthood in the Holy Catholic Church, that his first name had originally been Crocefisso, a religious name given only by the most pious parents. Indeed, as a slender youth he was forced to play the part of Christ in those religious plays put on in celebration of Holy Easter and was acclaimed for his marvelous air of piety.

But when he grew to manhood at the turn of the century, it was clear that Croce Malo had difficulty accepting any authority other than himself. He smuggled, he extorted, he stole, and finally, worst of all, he impregnated a young girl of the village, an innocent Magdalene in the plays. He then refused to marry her, claiming they had both been carried away with the religious fervor of the play, and therefore he should be forgiven.

The girl's family found this explanation too subtle to accept and demanded matrimony or death. Croce Malo was too proud to marry a girl so dishonored and fled to the mountains. After a year as a bandit, he had the good fortune to make contact with the Mafia.

"Mafia," in Arabic, means a place of sanctuary, and the word took its place in the Sicilian language when the Saracens ruled the country in the tenth century. Throughout history, the people of Sicily were oppressed mercilessly by the Romans, the Papacy, the Normans, the French, the Germans, and the Spanish. Their governments enslaved the poor working class, exploiting their labor, raping their women, murdering their leaders. Even the rich did not escape. The Spanish Inquisition of the Holy Catholic Church stripped them of their wealth for being heretics. And so the "Mafia" sprang up as a secret society of avengers. When the royal courts refused to take action against a Norman noble who raped a farmer's wife, a band of peasants assassinated him. When a police chief tortured some petty thief with the dreaded cassetta, that police chief was killed. Gradually the strongest-willed of the peasants and the poor formed themselves into an organized society which had the support of the people and in effect became a second and more powerful government. When there was a wrong to be redressed, no one ever went to the official police, they went to the leader of the local Mafia, who mediated the problem.

The greatest crime a Sicilian could commit was to give any information of any kind to the authorities about anything done by the Mafia. They kept silent. And this silence came to be called omerta. Over the centuries the practice enlarged to never giving the police information about a crime committed even against oneself. All communications broke down between the people and the law enforcement agencies of reigning governments so that even a small child was taught not to give a stranger the simplest directions to a village or a person's house.

Through the centuries the Mafia governed Sicily, a presence so shadowy and indistinct that the authorities could never quite grasp the extent of its power. Up until World War II, the word "Mafia" was never uttered on the island of Sicily.

Five years after Don Croce's flight into the mountains, he was well known as a "Qualified Man." That is, someone who could be entrusted with the elimination of a human being without causing more than a minimal amount of trouble. He was a "Man of Respect," and after making certain arrangements, he returned to live in his native town of Villaba, some forty miles south of Palermo. These arrangements included paying an indemnity to the family of the girl he had dishonored. This was later heralded as the measure of his generosity, but it was rather the proof of his wisdom. The pregnant girl had already been shipped to relatives in America with the label of a young widow to hide her shame, but her family still remembered. They were, after all, Sicilian. Don Croce, a skilled murderer, a brutal extorter, a member of the dreaded Friends of the Friends, could not comfortably count on all this to protect him from the family that had been disgraced. It was a matter of honor, and if not for the indemnity, they would have had to kill him no matter what the consequences.

By combining generosity with prudence, Croce Malo acquired the respectful title of "Don." By the time he was forty years old he was acknowledged as the foremost of the Friends of the Friends and was called upon to adjudicate the most desperate disputes between rival cosc h e of the Mafia, to settle the most savage vendettas. He was reasonable, he was clever, he was a born diplomat, but most important of all, he did not turn faint at the sight of blood. He became known as the "Don of Peace" throughout the Sicilian Mafia, and everyone prospered; the stubborn were eliminated with judicious murders and Don Croce was a rich man. Even his brother, Beniamino, had become a secretary to the Cardinal of Palermo, but blood was thicker than holy water and he owed his first allegiance to Don Croce.

He married and became father to a little boy he adored. Don Croce, not so prudent as he was later to become, not so humble as he later learned to be under the whip of adversity, engineered a coup that made him famous all through Sicily, and an object of wonder to the highest circle of Roman society. This coup sprang from a bit of marital discord which even the greatest men in history have had to endure.

Don Croce, because of his position in the Friends of the Friends, had married into a proud family who had recently bought patents of nobility for such a huge sum that the blood in their veins turned blue. After a few years of marriage, his wife treated him with a lack of respect he knew he had to correct, though of course not in his usual fashion. His wife's blue blood had made her disenchanted with Don Croce's no-nonsense, earthy peasant ways, his practice of saying nothing if he had nothing to the point to say, his casual attire, his habit of rough command in all things. There was also the remembrance of how all her other suitors melted away when Don Croce announced his candidacy for her hand.

She did not of course show her disrespect in any obvious fashion. This was, after all, Sicily, not England or America. But the Don was an extraordinarily sensitive soul. He soon observed that his wife did not worship the ground upon which he walked, and that was proof enough of her disrespect. He became determined to win her devotion in such a way that it would last a lifetime and he could then devote his full attention to business. His supple mind wrestled with the problem and came up with a plan worthy of Machiavelli himself.

The King of Italy was coming to Sicily to visit his devoted subjects, and devoted they were. All Sicilians hated the Roman government and feared the Mafia. But they loved the monarchy because it extended their family, which consisted of blood relations, the Virgin Mary and God himself. Great festivals were prepared for the King's visit.

On his first Sunday in Sicily the King went to Mass at the great Cathedral of Palermo. He was to stand godfather to the son of one of the ancient nobles of Sicily, the Prince Ollorto. The King was already godfather to at least a hundred children, sons of field marshals, dukes and the most powerful men of the Fascist party. These were political acts to cement relationships between the crown and the executives of the government. Royal godchildren automatically became Cavaliers of the Crown and were sent the documents and sash to prove the honor given them. Also a small silver cup.

Don Croce was ready. He had three hundred people in the festival throng. His brother, Beniamino, was one of the priests officiating at the ceremony. The baby of Prince Ollorto was baptized, and his proud father came out of the cathedral holding the baby aloft in triumph. The crowd roared its approval. Prince Ollorto was one of the less hated of the gentry, a slim handsome man; looks always counted for something in Sicily.

At that moment a crowd of Don Croce's people surged into the cathedral and effectively blocked the King's exit. The King was a little man with a mustache thicker than the hair on his head. He was in the full gaudy uniform of the Cavaliers, which made him look like a toy soldier. But despite his pompous appearance he was extremely kindhearted, so when Father Beniamino thrust another swaddled infant into his arms he was bewildered but did not protest. The surging crowd had, on Don Croce's instructions, cut him off from his retinue and the officiating Cardinal of Palermo so they could not interfere. Father Beniamino hastily sprinkled holy water from a nearby font and then snatched the baby out of the King's arms and handed it to Don Croce. Don Croce's wife wept tears of happiness as she knelt before the King. He was now the godfather of their only child. She could ask no more.

Don Croce grew fat and the bony face grew cheeks that were huge slabs of mahogany; his nose became a great beak that served as an antenna for power. His crinkly hair grew into a barbed-wire gray. His body ballooned majestically; his eyes became lidded with flesh that grew like a heavy moss over his face. His power increased with each pound until he seemed to become an impenetrable obelisk. He seemed to have no weaknesses as a man; he never showed anger, never showed greed. He was affectionate in an impersonal way but never showed love. He was conscious of his grave responsibilities and so never voiced his fears in his wife's bed or on her breast. He was the true King of Sicily. But his son – the heir apparent – was struck with the strange disease of religious social reform and had emigrated to Brazil to educate and uplift savage Indians along the Amazon. The Don was so shamed he never uttered his son's name again.

At the beginning of Mussolini's rise to power, Don Croce was not impressed. He had observed him carefully and had come to the conclusion that the man had neither cunning nor courage. And if such a one could rule Italy then it followed that he, Don Croce, could rule Sicily.

But then calamity fell. After a few years in power Mussolini turned his baleful eye on Sicily and the Mafia. He recognized that this was not a raggedy set of criminals but a true inner government that controlled a part of his empire. And he recognized that all through history the Mafia had conspired against whatever government ruled in Rome. Rulers of Sicily for the last thousand years had tried and failed. Now the Dictator vowed to strike them down forever. The Fascists did not believe in democracy, the legal rule of society. They did what they pleased for what they regarded as the good of the state. In short, they used the methods of Don Croce Malo.

Mussolini sent his most trusted Minister, Cesare Mori, to Sicily as a Prefect with unlimited powers. Mori started by suspending the rule of all judicial courts in Sicily and bypassing all legal safeguards of Sicilians. He flooded Sicily with troops who were ordered to shoot and ask questions later. He arrested and deported entire villages.

Before the dictatorship, Italy had had no capital punishment, which left it at a disadvantage against the Mafia, which used death as its chief enforcing tool. All this changed under the Prefect Mori. Proud Mafiosi, who adhered to the law of omerta, resisting even the dreaded cassetta, were shot. So-called conspirators were exiled to small isolated islands in the Mediterranean. In a year the island of Sicily was decimated, the Mafia destroyed as a governing force. It was of no consequence to Rome that thousands of innocent people were caught up in this wide net and suffered with the guilty.

Don Croce loved the fair rules of democracy and was outraged by the actions of the Fascisti. Friends and colleagues were jailed on trumped-up charges, since they were far too clever to leave evidence of their crimes. Many were imprisoned on hearsay, secret information from scoundrels who could not be tracked down and reasoned with, because they did not have to appear in open court and testify. Where was judicial fair play? The Fascists had gone back to the days of the Inquisition, of the divine right of kings. Don Croce had never believed in the divine right of kings, indeed he asserted that no reasonable human being had ever believed in it except when the alternative was being torn apart by four wild horses.

Even worse, the Fascists had brought back the cassetta, that medieval instrument of torture – a terrible box three feet long, two feet wide, which worked wonders on stubborn bodies. Even the most determined Mafioso found his tongue as loose as the morals of an Englishwoman when subject to the cassetta. Don Croce indignantly boasted that he had never used torture of any kind. Simple murder sufficed.

Like a stately whale, Don Croce submerged himself in the murky waters of the Sicilian underground. He entered a monastery as a pseudo Franciscan monk, under Abbot Manfredi's protection. They had had a long and pleasurable association. The Don, though proud of his illiteracy, had been obliged to employ the Abbot to write necessary ransom letters when early in his career he had followed the trade of kidnapping. They had always been honest with each other. They found they had common tastes – loose women, good wine and complex thievery. The Don had often taken the Abbot on trips to Switzerland to visit his doctors and sample the placid luxuries of that country. A restful and pleasant change from the more dangerous pleasures of Sicily.

When World War II started, Mussolini could no longer give Sicily his closest attention. Don Croce immediately took this opportunity to very quietly build up lines of communication with the remaining Friends of the Friends, sending messages of hope to the old Mafia stalwarts who had been exiled on the tiny islands of Pantelleria and Stromboli. He befriended the families of those Mafia leaders who had been imprisoned by the Prefect Mori.

Don Croce knew his only hope, ultimately, was an Allied victory, and that he must exert all his efforts to that end. He made contact with underground partisan groups and gave orders to his men to aid any Allied pilots who survived being shot down. And so, at the crucial hour, Don Croce was prepared.

When the American Army invaded Sicily in July of 1943, Don Croce extended his helping hand. Were there not many fellow Sicilians in this invading army, the sons of immigrants? Should Sicilian fight against Sicilian for the sake of the Germans? Don Croce's men persuaded thousands of Italian soldiers to desert and retire to a hiding place prepared for them by the Mafia. Don Croce personally made contact with secret agents of the American Army and led the attacking forces through mountain passages so that they could outflank the entrenched German heavy guns. And so while the British invading force on the other side of the island met with huge casualties and could only advance slowly, the American Army accomplished its mission far ahead of schedule and with very little loss of life.

Don Croce himself, though now almost sixty-five years of age and enormously heavy, led a band of Mafioso partisans into the city of Palermo and kidnapped the German general commanding its defense. He hid with his prisoner in the city until the front was broken and the American Army marched in. The American Supreme Commander of southern Italy referred to Don Croce in his dispatches to Washington as "General Mafia." And so he was known by American staff officers in the months that followed.

The American Military Governor of Sicily was a Colonel Alfonso La Ponto. As a high-ranking politician in the state of New Jersey, he had received a direct commission and had been trained for this particular job. His greatest assets were his affability and knowing how to put together a political deal. His staff officers in military government had been chosen for similar qualifications. The headquarters of AMGOT consisted of twenty officers and fifty enlisted men. Many of them were of Italian extraction. Don Croce took all of them to his bosom with the sincere love of a blood brother, showing them every mark of devotion and affection. This despite the fact that with his friends he often referred to them as our "Lambs in Christ."

But Don Croce had "delivered the goods," as the Americans often said. Colonel La Ponto made Don Croce his chief adviser and boon companion. The Colonel came often to dine at his house and groaned with pleasure eating the familiar cooking.

The first problem to be solved was appointing new mayors for all the small towns in Sicily. The former mayors had been Fascists, of course, and had been thrown into American prisons.

Don Croce recommended Mafia leaders who had been imprisoned. Since their records clearly showed that they had been tortured and jailed by the Fascist government for resistance to the aims and welfare of the state, it was assumed that the crimes of which they were accused were trumped-up charges. Don Croce, over his wife's superb fish and spaghetti dishes, told beautiful stories about how his friends, murderers and thieves all, had refused to surrender their beliefs in the democratic principles of justice and freedom. The Colonel was delighted at finding so quickly the ideal people to run the civilian population under his direction. Within a month most of the towns in Western Sicily had as their mayors a set of the most diehard Mafiosi to be found in Fascist prisons.

And they functioned superbly for the American Army. Only a minimum of Occupation troops had to be left behind to preserve order over the conquered people. As the war continued on the mainland, there was no sabotage behind American lines, no spies roamed. Black-marketing by the common people was held to a minimum. The Colonel received a special medal and promotion to Brigadier General.

Don Croce's Mafia mayors enforced the smuggling laws with the utmost severity and the carabinieri patrolled the roads and mountain bypasses ceaselessly. It was like old times. Don Croce gave orders to both. Government inspectors made sure that stubborn farmers turned in their grain and olives and grapes to government warehouses at officially set prices – these, of course, to be rationed out to the people of Sicily. To ensure this, Don Croce requested and received the loan of American Army trucks to transport these foodstuffs to the starving cities of Palermo, Monreale, and Trapani, to Syracuse and Catania, and even to Naples on the mainland. The Americans marveled at Don Croce's efficiency and awarded him written commendations for his services to the armed forces of the United States.

But Don Croce could not eat these commendations, he could not even read them for his pleasure, as he was illiterate. The backslappings of Colonel La Ponto did not fill his enormous belly. Don Croce, not trusting to the gratitude of the Americans or the blessings given by God for virtue, was determined that his many good works in the service of humanity and democracy be rewarded. So these cram-filled American trucks, their drivers armed with official road passes signed by the Colonel, rolled to quite different destinations designated by Don Croce. They unloaded at the Don's own personal warehouses located in small towns like Montelepre, Villaba and Partinico. Then Don Croce and his colleagues sold them for fifty times their official prices on the flourishing black market. So he cemented his relationships with the most powerful leaders of the resurgent Mafia. For Don Croce believed that greediness was the greatest of all human failings, and he shared his profits freely.

He was more than generous. Colonel La Ponto received magnificent presents of antique statues, paintings and ancient jewelry. It was the Don's pleasure. The officers and men of the American Military Government detachment were like sons to him, and like any doting father he showered them with gifts. These men, specially chosen for their understanding of Italian character and culture, since many of them were of Sicilian origin, returned his love. They signed special travel passes, they maintained the trucks assigned to Don Croce with particular care. They went to his parties where they met good Sicilian girls and became entwined in the loving warmth which is the other side of the Sicilian character. Taken into these Sicilian families, fed the familiar food of their emigrant mothers, many of them wooed Mafioso daughters.

Don Croce Malo had everything in position to resume his former power. Mafia chiefs all over Sicily were in his debt. He controlled the artesian wells that sold water to the population of the island at prices that would give him a good profit. He created the monopolies on foodstuffs; he levied a tax on every market stall that sold fruit, every butcher shop that sold meat, the cafes with their coffee bars, and even the strolling bands of musicians. Since the only source of gasoline was the American Army, he controlled that also. He furnished overseers to the huge estates of the nobility, and in time planned to buy their lands at cheap prices. He was on the road to establishing the kind of power he wielded before Mussolini took over Italy. He was determined to become rich again. In the coming years he would, as the saying goes, put Sicily through his olive press.

Only one thing truly troubled Don Croce. His only son had gone mad with the eccentric desire to do good deeds. His brother, Father Beniamino, could have no family. The Don had no one of his blood to whom to bequeath his empire. He had no trusted warrior chieftain, young and tied by blood, to be a mailed fist when his velvet glove proved unpersuasive.

The Don's people had already marked young Salvatore Guiliano, and the Abbot Manfredi had confirmed his potential. Now more legends of this young boy's exploits were sweeping Sicily. The Don smelled an answer to his only problem.

CHAPTER 8

The morning after their escape from Montelepre, Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta bathed in a swift-running stream behind their cave on Monte d'Ora. They took their guns to the edge of the cliff and spread out a blanket to enjoy the pink-streaked dawn.

The Grotta Bianca was a long cave that ended in a mass of boulders that reached to the ceiling, or almost. When they were little boys Turi and Aspanu had managed to squeeze over those boulders and discover a passage that ran right through to the other side of the mountain. It had existed before Christ, dug by the army of Spartacus, hiding from Roman legions.

Far below, tiny as a toy village, lay Montelepre. The many paths that led to their cliff were thin chalky worms which clung to the sides of the mountains. One by one the gray stone houses of Montelepre were turned to gold by the rising sun.

The morning air was clear, the prickly pears on the ground were cool and sweet and Turi picked one up and bit into it carefully to freshen his mouth. In a few hours the heat of the sun would turn them into juiceless cottony balls. Gecko lizards, with huge balloonlike heads on tiny insect legs, crawled over his hand, but they were harmless despite their obscenely frightening appearance. He flicked them aside.

While Aspanu cleaned the guns, Turi watched the town below. His naked eye picked out tiny black dots, people going into the countryside to work their little pieces of land. He tried to locate his own house. Long ago he and Aspanu had flown the flags of Sicily and America from that roof. Gleefully cunning children, they had accepted praise as patriots, but the real reason was to keep the house under observation while they roamed the tops of the nearby mountains – a reassuring link to the adult world.

Suddenly he remembered something that had happened ten years ago. The Fascist officials of the village had ordered them to take down the American flag from the Guiliano roof. The two boys had been so enraged that they had taken down both flags, the American and the Sicilian. Then they had taken the flags to their secret hideout, the Grotta Bianca, and buried the flags near the wall of boulders.

Guiliano said to Pisciotta, "Keep an eye on those trails," and went into the cave. Even after ten years, Guiliano remembered exactly where they had buried the flags, in the right-hand corner where the boulders met the earth. They had dug in the dirt underneath the boulder, then packed the earth back over it.

A mat of thin, slimy, green-black moss had grown over the spot. Guiliano dug into it with his boot and then used a small stone as a pick. In a matter of minutes the flags were uncovered. The American flag was a slimy mess of rags, but they had wrapped the Sicilian flag inside the American one, and the shielded one had survived. Guiliano flipped it open, the scarlet and gold colors as bold as when he was a child. There was not even a hole in it. He brought it outside and said to Pisciotta, laughing, "Do you remember this, Aspanu?"

Pisciotta stared at the flag. Then he too laughed, but in a more excited way. "It's fate," he shouted and jumped up and snatched the flag from Guiliano's hand. He went to the cliff's edge and waved it at the town below. They did not even have to speak to each other. Guiliano tore off a sapling that grew on the cliff face. They dug a hole and propped the sapling up with stones, then attached the flag to the sapling so that it flew free for all the world to see. Finally, they sat on the cliff edge to wait.

It was midday before they saw anything and then it was just a lone man riding a donkey on the dusty path that led to their cliff. They watched for another hour and then as the donkey entered the mountain range and took the upward path, Pisciotta said, "Damn, that rider is smaller than his donkey. It must be your godfather, Adonis."

Guiliano recognized the contempt in Pisciotta's voice. Pisciotta – so slender, so dapper, so well formed – had a horror of physical deformity. His tubercular lungs, which sometimes bloodied his mouth, disgusted him, not because of the danger to his life, but because it marred what he thought of as his beauty. Sicilians have a fondness for giving people nicknames related to their physical failings or abnormalities, and once a friend had called Pisciotta "Paper Lungs." Pisciotta had tried to stab him with his pocketknife. Only Guiliano's strength had prevented murder.

Guiliano ran down the mountainside for a few miles and hid behind a huge granite rock. It was one of his childhood games with Aspanu. He waited for Adonis to pass him on the trail, then he stepped out from his sheltering rock and called, "Stand where you are." He pointed his lupara.

Again it was the childhood game. Adonis turned slowly in such a way that he shielded the drawing of his pistol. But Guiliano, laughing, had stepped behind the sheltering rock; only the barrel of his lupara gleamed in the sunlight.

Guiliano called, "Godfather, it's Turi," and waited until Adonis put his gun back into his waistband and shrugged out of his knapsack. Then Guiliano lowered his lupara and stepped into the open. Guiliano knew that Hector Adonis always had trouble dismounting because of his short legs and he wanted to help him. But when he appeared on the path the Professor slid down quickly, and they embraced. They walked up to the cliff, Guiliano leading the donkey.

"Well, young man, you've burned your bridges," Hector Adonis said in his professional voice. "Two more dead policemen after last night. It's no longer a joke."

When they arrived on the cliff face and Pisciotta greeted him, Adonis said, "As soon as I saw the Sicilian flag I knew you were up here."

Pisciotta grinned and said good-humoredly, "Turi and myself and this mountain have seceded from Italy."

Hector Adonis gave him a sharp look. That self-centeredness of youth, stating its own supreme importance.

"The whole town has seen your flag," Adonis said. "Including the Maresciallo of the carabinieri. They will be coming up to take it down."

Pisciotta said impudently, "Always the schoolmaster giving knowledge. They're welcome to our flag, but that is all they'll find here. We're safe at night. It would be a miracle for the carabinieri to come out of their barracks after dark."

Adonis ignored him and unpacked the sack on his donkey. He gave Guiliano a pair of powerful binoculars and a first-aid kit, a clean shirt, some underwear, a knitted sweater, a shaving kit with his father's straight-edge razor and six bars of soap. "You will need these up here," he said.

Guiliano was delighted with the field glasses. They headed the list of things he needed to acquire in the next few weeks. He knew his mother had hoarded the soap over the last year.

In a separate package were a huge hunk of grainy cheese speckled with pepper, a loaf of bread, and two large round cakes that were really bread stuffed with prosciutto ham and mozzarella cheese and crowned with hard-boiled eggs.

Adonis said, "La Venera sent you the cakes. She says she always baked them for her husband when he was in the mountains. You can live on one for a week."

Pisciotta smiled slyly and said, "The older they get the better the taste."

The two young men sat in the grass and tore off pieces of the bread. Pisciotta used his knife to cut off hunks of the cheese. The grass around them was alive with insects, so they put the food sack on top of a granite boulder. They drank water from a clear stream that ran only a hundred feet below them. Then they rested where they could see over the cliff.

Hector Adonis sighed. "You two are very pleased with yourselves, but it is no joke. If they catch you, they'll shoot you."

Guiliano said calmly, "And if I catch them, I'll shoot them."

Hector Adonis was shocked at this. There would never be hope of a pardon. "Don't be rash," he said. "You're still only a boy."

Guiliano looked at him for a long moment. "I was old enough for them to shoot me over a piece of cheese. Do you expect me to run? To let my family starve? To let you bring me packages of food while I take a vacation in the mountains? They come to kill me, and so I'll kill them. And you, my dear godfather. When I was a child, didn't you lecture me on the miserable life of the Sicilian peasant? How oppressed they are, by Rome and its tax collectors, by the nobility, by rich landowners who pay for our labor with lire that can barely keep us alive? I went to the marketplace with two hundred other men of Montelepre and they bid for us as if we were cattle. A hundred lire for a morning's work they said, take it or leave it. And most of the men had to take it. Who then will be the champion of Sicily, if not Salvatore Guiliano?"

Hector Adonis was truly dismayed. It was bad enough to be an outlaw, but to be a revolutionary was more dangerous. "That's all very well in literature," he said. "But in real life you can go to an early grave." He paused for a moment. "What good did your heroics the other night do? Your neighbors are still in jail."

"I'll free them," Guiliano said quietly. He could see the astonishment on his godfather's face. He wanted his approval, his help, his understanding. He could see that Adonis still thought of him as the good-hearted village youth. "You must understand how I am now." He paused for a moment. Could he say exactly what he thought? Would his godfather think him insanely proud? But he went on. "I am not afraid of dying." He smiled at Hector Adonis, the boyish smile Adonis knew so well and loved. "Really, I'm astonished by it myself. But I'm not afraid of being killed. It doesn't seem possible to me." He laughed aloud. "Their field police, their armored cars, their machine guns, all of Rome. I'm not afraid of them. I can beat them. The mountains of Sicily are full of bandits. Passatempo and his band. Terranova. They defy Rome. What they can do, I can do."

Hector Adonis felt a mixture of amusement and anxiety. Had the wound affected Guiliano's brain? Or was what he saw now the same as the beginning of history's heroes, the Alexanders, the Caesars, the Rolands? When did the dreams of heroes begin, if not when sitting in a lonely glen, talking to dear friends. But he said casually, "Forget about Terranova and Passatempo. They have been captured and are sitting in the jail at the Bellampo Barracks. They will be transported to Palermo in a few days."

Guiliano said, "I'll rescue them, and then I'll expect their gratitude."

The grimness with which he said this astonished Hector Adonis and delighted Pisciotta. It was startling to them to see the change in their Guiliano. They had always loved and respected him. He had always had great dignity and poise for such a young man. But now for the first time they sensed his drive for power.

Hector Adonis said, "Gratitude? Passatempo killed the uncle who gave him his first donkey."

"Then I must teach him the meaning of gratitude," Guiliano said. He paused for a moment. "And now I have a favor to ask of you. Think it over carefully, and if you refuse, I will still be your devoted godson. Forget that you're the dear friend of my parents and forget your affection for me. I ask this favor for the Sicily you taught me to love. Be my eyes and ears in Palermo."

Hector Adonis said to him, "What you're asking me, as Professor at the University of Palermo, is to become a member of your band of outlaws."

Pisciotta said impatiently, "That's not so strange in Sicily, where everyone is hooked to the Friends of the Friends. And where else but in Sicily does a Professor of History and Literature carry a pistol?"

Hector Adonis studied both of the young men as he pondered his answer. He could easily promise to help and forget his promise. He could just as easily refuse and promise only to give the aid a friend would give from time to time, as he was doing today. After all, the comedy might be short. Guiliano might be killed fighting or betrayed. He might emigrate to America. And the problem would be solved, he thought sadly.

Hector Adonis remembered a long-ago summer day, a day very like this one, when Turi and Aspanu were no more than eight years old. They had been sitting in the pasture lying between the Guiliano house and the mountains, waiting for supper. Hector Adonis had brought a bag of books for Turi. One of them was the Song of Roland, and he had read it to them.

Adonis knew the poem almost by heart. It was dear to every literate Sicilian, and its story was beloved by the illiterate. It was the mainstay of the puppet theater that played every town and village, and its legendary characters were painted on the side of every wagon that rolled along the Sicilian hills. Emperor Charlemagne's two great knights, Roland and Oliver, slaughtered the Saracens, protecting their Emperor's retreat into France. Adonis told how they had died together in the great battle of Roncevalles – how Oliver begged three times for Roland to blow his horn to bring back Charlemagne's army and how Roland refused out of pride. And then when the Saracens overwhelmed them, Roland blew his great horn, but it was too late. When Charlemagne returned to rescue his knights, he found their bodies among the thousands of dead Saracens and rent his beard. Adonis remembered the tears in Turi Guiliano's eyes and, oddly enough, the look of scorn on the face of Aspanu Pisciotta. To one it was the greatest moment a man could live, to the other child it was a humiliating death at the hands of the infidel.

The two young boys had gotten up from the grass to run into the house for supper. Turi threw his arms across Aspanu's shoulder, and Hector had smiled at the gesture. It was Roland holding Oliver erect so that they could both die on their feet before the charging Saracens. Roland, dying, had reached out his gauntlet to the azure sky, and an angel had plucked it from his hand. Or so the poem and legend said.

That was a thousand years ago, but Sicily still suffered in the same brutal landscape of olive groves and scorching plains, of roadside shrines built by the first followers of Christ, the countless crosses holding the crucified rebellious slaves led by Spartacus. And his godson would be another of these heroes, not understanding that for Sicily to change, there would have to be a moral volcano that would incinerate the land.

As Adonis watched them now, Pisciotta lounging on his back in the grass, Guiliano staring at him with dark brown eyes and with a smile that seemed to say he knew exactly what his godfather was thinking, a curious transformation of the scene took place. Adonis saw them as statues carved in marble, their bodies wrenched out of ordinary life. Pisciotta became a figure on a vase, the gecko in his hand an adder, all finely etched in the morning sunlight of the mountains. Pisciotta looked dangerous, a man who filled the world with poison and daggers.

Salvatore Guiliano, his godson Turi, was the other side of the vase. His had the beauty of some Greek Apollo, the features fully molded flesh, the eyes with whites so clear they gave almost the impression of blindness. His face was open and frank with the innocence of a legendary hero. Or rather, thought Adonis, rejecting his sentimentality, the resolution of a young man determined to be heroic. His body had the muscular fleshiness of those Mediterranean statues, the heavy thighs, the muscular back. His body was American, taller and broader than most Sicilians'.

Even when they were boys Pisciotta had showed a practical cunning. Guiliano had been the generous believer in the goodness of man, and proud of his own truthfulness. In those days Hector Adonis had often thought that Pisciotta would be the leader when they were men, Guiliano the follower. But he should have known better. A belief in one's own virtue is far more dangerous than a belief in one's cunning.

Pisciotta's mocking voice broke into these daydreams of Hector Adonis. "Please say yes, Professor. I am the second in command of Guiliano's band, but I have no one under me to give orders." He was grinning. "I am willing to start small."

Though Adonis was not provoked, Guiliano's eyes flashed with anger. But he said quietly, "What is your answer?" Hector Adonis said. "Yes." What else could a godfather say? Then Guiliano told him what he had to do when he returned to Montelepre and outlined his plans for the next day. Adonis was again appalled at the boldness and ferocity of this young man's schemes. But when Guiliano lifted him onto his donkey he leaned over and kissed his godson.

Pisciotta and Guiliano watched Adonis riding down the trail toward Montelepre. "He's such a little man," Pisciotta said. "He would have fitted in much better when we were playing bandits as children."

Guiliano turned to him and said gently, "And your jokes would have been better then. Be serious when we talk of serious things." But that night before they went to sleep, they embraced each other. "You are my brother," Guiliano said. "Remember that." Then they wrapped themselves in their blankets and slept away the last night of their obscurity.

CHAPTER 9

Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta were up before the dawn, before the first light, for though it was unlikely, the carabinieri might start in darkness to surprise them with the morning sun. They had seen the armored car from Palermo arrive in the Bellampo Barracks late the evening before with two jeeploads of reinforcements. During the night Guiliano made scouting patrols down the side of the mountain and listened for any sounds that would be made by anyone approaching their cliff – a precaution Pisciotta ridiculed. "When we were children we would have been such daredevils," he told Guiliano, "but do you think those lazy carabinieri will risk their lives in darkness, or even miss a good night's sleep in soft beds?"

"We have to train ourselves into good habits," Turi Guiliano said. He knew that someday there would be better enemies.

Turi and Aspanu worked hard laying out guns on a blanket and checking them in every detail. Then they ate some of La Venera's bread cake, washed down with a flask of wine Hector Adonis had left them. The cake, with its heat and spices, lay glowingly in their stomachs. It gave them the energy to construct a screen of saplings and boulders on the edge of the cliff. Behind this screen, they watched the town and the mountain paths with their binoculars. Guiliano loaded the guns and put boxes of ammunition into the pockets of his sheepskin jacket while Pisciotta kept watch. Guiliano did his job carefully and slowly. He even buried all the supplies and covered the ground with huge rocks himself. He was never to trust anyone to check these details. So it was Pisciotta who spotted the armored car leaving the Bellampo Barracks.

"You're right," Pisciotta said. "The car is going down the Castellammare plain away from us."

They grinned at each other. Guiliano felt a quiet elation. Fighting the police would not be so difficult after all. It was a child's game with a child's cunning. The armored car would disappear around a curve of the road and then circle back and come into the mountains to the rear of their cliff. The authorities must know about the tunnel and expect them to use it to escape and run right into the armored car. And its machine guns.

In an hour the carabinieri would send a detachment up the sides to Monte d'Ora in a frontal attack to flush them out. It helped that the police thought of them as wild youths, simple outlaws. The scarlet and gold flag of Sicily that they flew from the cliff edge confirmed their careless impudence, or so the police would think.

An hour later, a troop van and a jeep carrying the Maresciallo Roccofino left through the gates of the Bellampo Barracks. The two vehicles traveled leisurely to the foot of Monte d'Ora and stopped to unload. Twelve carabinieri armed with rifles deployed on the tiny paths that led up the slope. Maresciallo Roccofino took off his braided cap and pointed it toward the scarlet and gold flag flying over the cliff above them.

Turi Guiliano was watching through the binoculars from behind the screen of saplings. For a moment he worried about the armored car on the other side of the mountain. Would they have sent some men up the opposite slope? But those men would take hours to climb, they could not be close. He put them out of his mind and said to Pisciotta, "Aspanu, if we're not as clever as we think, we won't be going home to our mothers and a plate of spaghetti this night, as we used to do when we were children."

Pisciotta laughed. "We always hated going home, remember? But I have to admit, this is more fun. Shall we kill a few of them?"

"No," Guiliano said. "Fire over their heads." He thought about how Pisciotta disobeyed him two nights before. He said, "Aspanu, obey me. There's no point in killing them. It can't serve any purpose this time."

They waited patiently for an hour. Then Guiliano pushed his shotgun through the screen of saplings and fired twice. It was amazing how that straight confident line of men scattered so quickly, like darting ants disappearing into the grass. Pisciotta fired his rifle four times. Smoke puffs appeared in different parts of the slope as the carabinieri fired back.

Guiliano put down his shotgun and took up the binoculars. He could see the Maresciallo and his Sergeant working a radio communications set. They would be contacting the armored car on the other side of the mountain, warning them that the outlaws would be on their way. He picked up his shotgun again and fired twice, then said to Pisciotta, "It's time to leave."

The two of them crawled to the far side of the cliff out of view of the advancing carabinieri, then slid down the boulder-strewn slope, rolling for fifty yards before they came to their feet, weapons ready. Crouched low, they ran down the hill stopping only for Guiliano to observe the attackers through his binoculars.

The carabinieri were still firing up at the cliff, not realizing the two outlaws were now on their flanks. Guiliano led the way down a tiny, hidden path through massive boulders and entered a little forest. They rested for a few minutes and then they both started running down the path swiftly and silently. In less than an hour they emerged onto the plain that separated the mountains from the town of Montelepre, but they had circled around to the far side of the town; it lay between them and the troop-carrying van. They hid their weapons under their jackets and walked across the plain, looking like two peasants on their way to work in the fields. They entered Montelepre at the top of the Via Bella, only a hundred yards from the Bellampo Barracks.

At that same moment the Maresciallo Roccofino ordered his men to continue climbing the slopes toward the flag on the edge of the cliff. There had been no answering fire for the last hour and he was sure the two outlaws had fled through their tunnel and were now going down the other side of the mountain toward the armored car. He wanted to close the trap. It took his men another hour to reach the cliff edge and tear down the flag. Maresciallo Roccofino went into the cave and had the boulders pushed aside to open up the tunnel. He sent his men down that stone corridor and down the other side of the mountain to rendezvous with the armored car. He was astounded when he found that his quarry had escaped him. He broke up his men into searching and scouting parties, sure they would flush the fugitives from their holes.

Hector Adonis had followed Guiliano's instructions perfectly. At the top of the Via Bella was a painted cart, the ancient legends covering every inch, inside and out. Even the spokes of the wheels and the rims were painted with tiny armored figures so that when the wheels rolled they cleverly gave the illusion of men whirling in combat. The shafts too were colored in bright red curlicues with silver dots.

The cart looked like a man with tattoos that covered every inch of his body. Between the shafts stood a sleepy white mule. Guiliano jumped into the empty driver's seat and looked into the cart. It was packed with huge jugs of wine cradled into bamboo baskets. There were at least twenty of them. Guiliano slipped his shotgun behind a row of jugs. He gave a quick look toward the mountains; there was nothing to be seen, except the flag still flying. He grinned down at Pisciotta. "Everything is in place," he said. "Go and do your little dance."

Pisciotta gave a little salute, serious yet mocking, buttoned his jacket over his pistol, and started walking toward the gates of the Bellampo Barracks. As he walked he glanced down the road that led to Castellammare, just to make sure there was no armored car on its way back from the mountains.

High up on the cart seat, Turi Guiliano watched Pisciotta walk slowly across the open field and onto the stone path that led to the gate. Then he looked down the Via Bella. He could see his house, but there was nobody standing in front of it. He had hoped he might catch a glimpse of his mother. Some men were sitting in front of one of the houses, their table and wine bottles shaded by an overhanging balcony. Suddenly he remembered the binoculars around his neck and he undipped the strap and threw them into the back of the cart.

A young carabiniere stood guard at the gate, a boy no more than eighteen. His rosy cheeks and hairless face proclaimed his birth in the northern provinces of Italy; his black uniform with white piping, baggy and untailored, and his braided, fiercely military cap gave him the look of some puppet or clown. Against regulations he had a cigarette in his adolescent, cupid's bow mouth. Approaching on foot, Pisciotta felt a surge of amused contempt. Even after what had happened in the last few days the man did not have his rifle ready.

The guard only saw a scruffy peasant who dared to grow a mustache more elegant than he deserved. He said roughly, "You there, you lump, where do you think you're going?" He did not unsling his rifle. Pisciotta could have cut his throat in a second.

Instead he tried to look obsequious, tried to suppress his mirth at this child's arrogance. He said, "If you please, I wish to see the Maresciallo. I have some valuable information."

"You can give it to me," the guard said.

Pisciotta could not help himself. He said scornfully, "And can you pay me too?"

The guard was astounded by this impudence. Then he said contemptuously but a little warily, "I wouldn't pay you a lira if you told me Jesus had come again."

Pisciotta grinned. "Better than that. I know where Turi Guiliano has come again, the man who bloodied your noses."

The guard said suspiciously, "Since when does a Sicilian help the law in this damned country?"

Pisciotta moved a little closer. "But I have ambitions," he said. "I've put in an application to become a carabiniere. Next month I go to Palermo for my examination. Who knows, both of us might soon be wearing the same uniform."

The guard looked at Pisciotta with a more friendly interest. It was true that many Sicilians became policemen. It was a road out of poverty, it was a small piece of power. It was a well-known national joke that Sicilians became either criminals or policemen and that they did equal damage on both sides. Meanwhile Pisciotta was laughing inwardly at the thought that he would ever become a carabiniere. Pisciotta was a dandy; he owned a silk shirt made in Palermo. Only a fool would preen in that white-piped black uniform and that ridiculous braided stiff billed cap.

"You'd better think twice," the guard said, not wanting everybody to be in on a good thing. "The pay is small and we'd all starve if we didn't take bribes from smugglers. And just this week two of the men of our barracks, good friends of mine, were killed by that damned Guiliano. And every day the insolence of your peasants who won't even give you directions to the barber in town."

Pisciotta said gaily, "We'll teach them some manners with the bastinado. " Then, with a confidential air, as if they were already brothers in arms, he said, "Have you a cigarette for me?"

To Pisciotta's delight, the moment of good will fled. The guard was outraged. "A cigarette for you?" he said incredulously. "Why in Christ's name should I give a piece of Sicilian dung a cigarette?" And now finally the guard unslung his rifle.

For a moment Pisciotta felt the savage urge to throw himself forward and slit the guard's throat. "Because I can tell you where to find Guiliano," Pisciotta said. "Your comrades searching the mountains are too stupid to find even a gecko."

The guard looked bewildered. The insolence had him confused; the information offered made him realize he had better consult his superior. He had a feeling that this man was too slippery and could get him into trouble of some kind. He opened the gate and motioned Pisciotta with his rifle to enter the grounds of the Bellampo Barracks. His back was to the street. At that moment, Guiliano, a hundred yards away, kicked the mule awake and started his cart onto the stone pathway to the gate.

The grounds of the Bellampo Barracks consisted of four acres. On the land was the large administration building with an L-shaped wing that held the jail cells. Behind it was the living barracks for the carabinieri themselves, large enough to hold a hundred men with a specially partitioned section that served as a private apartment for the Maresciallo. Off to the right side was a garage for vehicles that was really a barn and still served partially as such since the detachment supported a troop of mules and donkeys for mountain travel where mechanical vehicles were useless.

Far in the rear were a munitions shed and a supply shed, both made of corrugated steel. Surrounding the whole area was a seven-foot barbed wire fence with two high towers for sentries, but these had not been used for many months. The barracks had been built by the Mussolini regime and then enlarged during the war on the Mafia.

When Pisciotta went through the gate he checked for danger signals. The towers were empty, there were no roaming armed guards. It looked like some peaceful deserted farm. There were no vehicles in the garage; in fact there were no vehicles in sight anywhere, which surprised him, and made him worry that one would be returning soon. He could not conceive of the Maresciallo being so stupid as to leave his garrison without a vehicle. He would have to warn Turi that they might get unexpected visitors.

Shepherded by the young guard, Pisciotta entered the wide doors of the administration building. This was a huge room with ceiling fans which did little to dispel the heat. There was a large raised desk dominating the room, and on the sides were railings which enclosed smaller desks for clerks; around the room were wooden benches. These were all empty except for the raised desk. Seated at this was a carabinieri corporal who was an altogether different proposition from the young guard. An ornate gold nameplate on the desk read corporal Canio Silvestro. The upper part of his body was massive – great shoulders and thick columnar neck crowned by a huge boulder of a head. A pink scar, a slab of shiny dead tissue, seemed pasted from his ear down to the end of his rocklike jaw. A long bushy handlebar mustache flew out like two black wings over his mouth.

He wore the stripes of a corporal on his sleeve, a huge pistol at his belt and worst of all he regarded Pisciotta with the utmost suspicion and distrust as the guard recited his story. When Corporal Silvestro spoke his accent revealed him to be a Sicilian. "You are a lying piece of shit," he said to Pisciotta. But before he could go any further, Guiliano's voice could be heard shouting inside the gate.

"Hey there, carabiniere, do you want your wine or not? Yes or no?"

Pisciotta admired the style of Guiliano's voice; the tone coarse, the dialect so thick it was almost unintelligible except to natives of this province, the choice of words arrogantly typical of the well-to-do peasant.

The Corporal growled with exasperation, "What in Christ's name is that fellow bellowing about?" and with great strides was out the door. The guard and Pisciotta followed him.

The painted cart and its white mule were outside the gate. Bare to the waist, his broad chest streaming with sweat, Turi Guiliano was swinging a jug of wine. There was a huge idiotic grin on his face; his whole body seemed oafishly askew. His appearance disarmed suspicion. There could be no weapon concealed on his person, he was drunk and the accent was that of the most loutish dialect in all of Sicily. The Corporal's hand dropped from his pistol, the guard lowered his rifle. Pisciotta took a step backward ready to draw his own gun from beneath his jacket.

"I have a wagonload of wine for you," Guiliano bawled out again. He blew his nose with his fingers and snapped the mucus off into the gate.

"Who ordered this wine?" the Corporal asked. But he was walking down to the gate and Guiliano knew he would open it wide to let the wagon through.

"My father told me to bring it for the Maresciallo," Guiliano said with a wink.

The Corporal was staring at Guiliano. The wine was undoubtedly a gift for letting some farmer do a bit of smuggling. The Corporal thought uneasily that as a true Sicilian the father would have brought the wine himself to be more closely associated with the gift. But then he shrugged. "Unload the goods and bring them into the barracks."

Guiliano said, "Not by myself, I don't."

Again the Corporal felt a twinge of doubt. Some instinct warned him. Realizing this, Guiliano climbed down from the wagon in such a way that he could easily snatch the lupara from its hiding place. But first he lifted up a jug of wine in its bamboo case and said, "I have twenty of these beauties for you."

The Corporal roared out a command toward the quarters barracks and two young carabinieri came running out; their jackets were unbuttoned and they wore no caps. Neither did they bear weapons. Guiliano standing on top of his cart thrust jugs of wine into their arms. He gave a jug to the guard with the rifle, who tried to refuse. Guiliano said with rough good humor, "You'll certainly help drink it, so work."

Now with the three guards immobilized, their arms full of jugs, Guiliano surveyed the scene. It was exactly as he had wished. Pisciotta was directly behind the Corporal, the only soldier with his arms free. Guiliano scanned the slopes; there was no sign of any of the searching party returning. He checked the road to Castellammare; there was no sign of the armored car. Down the Via Bella the children were still playing. He reached into the wagon and pulled out the lupara and pointed it at the astonished Corporal. At the same time Pisciotta pulled the pistol from beneath his shirt. He pressed it against the Corporal's back. "Don't move an inch," Pisciotta said, "or I'll barber that great mustache of yours with lead."

Guiliano kept the lupara on the other three frightened guards. He said, "Keep those jugs in your arms and everybody go into the building." The armed guard hugging the jug let his rifle drop to the ground. Pisciotta picked it up as they moved inside. In the office, Guiliano picked up the name plaque and admired it. "Corporal Canio Silvestro. Your keys, please. All of them."

The Corporal's hand rested on his pistol and he glared at Guiliano. Pisciotta knocked his hand forward and plucked out his weapon. The Corporal turned and gave him a cold examining stare that was deadly. Pisciotta smiled and said, "Excuse me."

The Corporal turned to Guiliano and said, "My boy, run away and become an actor, you're very fine. Don't go on with this, you'll never escape. The Maresciallo and his men will be back before nightfall and will hunt you to the ends of the earth. Think it over, my young fellow, what it is to be an outlaw with a price on your head. I'll be hunting for you myself and I never forget a face. I'll find out your name and dig you out if you hide yourself in hell."

Guiliano smiled at him. For some reason he liked the man. He said, "But if you want to know my name, why don't you ask?"

The Corporal looked at him scornfully. "And you'll tell me, like an idiot?"

Guiliano said, "I never lie. My name is Guiliano."

The Corporal put his hand to his side for the pistol Pisciotta had already removed. Guiliano liked the man more for that instinctive reaction. He had courage and a sense of duty. The other guards were terrified. This was the Salvatore Guiliano who had already killed three of their comrades. There was no reason to think that he would leave them alive.

The Corporal studied Guiliano's face, memorizing it, then, moving slowly and carefully, took a huge ring of keys from a desk drawer. He did so because Guiliano had the shotgun pressed tightly against his back. Guiliano took the keys from him and tossed them to Pisciotta.

"Release those prisoners," he said.

In the prison wing of the administration building, in a large caged area, were ten citizens of Montelepre who had been arrested the night of Guiliano's escape. In one of the separate small cells were the two locally famous bandits, Passatempo and Terranova. Pisciotta unlocked their cell doors and they gleefully followed him into the other room.

The arrested citizens of Montelepre, all neighbors of Guiliano, flooded into the office and crowded around Guiliano to embrace him with gratitude. Guiliano permitted this but was always alert, his eyes on the captive carabinieri. His neighbors were in a delighted good humor at Guiliano's exploit; he had humiliated the hated police, he was their champion. They told him that the Maresciallo had ordered them to be bastinadoed but the Corporal had effectively stopped this punishment from being carried out by the sheer force of his character and his argument that such an action would create so much ill will that it would affect the safety of the barracks. Instead, the next morning they were to have been transported to Palermo to appear before a magistrate for interrogation.

Guiliano held his lupara muzzle down to the floor, afraid that an accidental shot would go into the crowd around him. These men were all older, neighbors he had known as a child. He was careful to speak to them as he had always spoken to them. "You are welcome to come with me to the mountains," he said. "Or you can go visit relatives in other parts of Sicily until the authorities come to their senses." He waited but there was only silence. The two bandits, Passatempo and Terranova, stood aside from the others. They were extremely alert, as if poised to spring. Passatempo was a short, squat ugly man with a gross face marked by childhood smallpox, his mouth thick and unshaped. The peasants in the countryside called him "The Brute." Terranova was small and built like a ferret. Yet his small features were pleasant, his lips molded into a natural smile. Passatempo had been the typical greedy Sicilian bandit who simply stole livestock and killed for money. Terranova had been a hard-working farmer and had started his career as an outlaw when two tax collectors came to confiscate his prize pig. He had killed both of them, slaughtered his pig for his family and relatives to eat and then fled to the mountains. The two men had joined forces but had been betrayed and captured when they were hiding in a deserted warehouse in the grain fields of Corleone.

Guiliano said to them, "You two have no choice. We will go to the mountains together and then if you like you can stay under my command or go off on your own. But for today I need your help and you do owe me a small service." He smiled at them, trying to soften the demand that they submit to his orders.

Before the two bandits could answer, the Corporal of the carabinieri committed an insane act of defiance. Perhaps it was out of some injured Sicilian pride, perhaps out of some inborn animal ferocity, or simply that the fact that the noted bandits in his custody were about to escape enraged him. He was standing only a few paces from Guiliano and with a surprising quickness he took a long step forward.

At the same time he drew a small pistol concealed inside his shirt. Guiliano swung the lupara up to fire but he was too late. The Corporal thrust the pistol to within two feet of Guiliano's head. The bullet would smash directly into Guiliano's face.

Everyone was frozen with shock. Guiliano saw the pistol pointed at his head. Behind it the red raging face of the Corporal was contorting its muscles like the body of a snake. But the pistol seemed to be coming very slowly. It was like falling in a nightmare, falling forever and yet knowing it was only a dream and that he would never hit the bottom. In the fraction of a second before the Corporal pulled the trigger, Guiliano felt an enormous serenity and no fear. His eyes did not blink when the Corporal pulled the trigger, indeed he took a step forward. There was a loud metallic click as the hammer hit the defective ammunition in the barrel. A fraction of a second afterward, he was swarmed over by Pisciotta, Terranova and Passatempo, and the Corporal was falling under the weight of bodies. Terranova had grasped the pistol and was twisting it away, Passatempo had the Corporal by the hair of his head and was trying to gouge out his eyes, Pisciotta had his knife out and ready to plunge it into the Corporal's throat. Guiliano caught it just in time.

Guiliano said quietly, "Don't kill him." And pulled them off the Corporal's now prone and defenseless body. He looked down and was dismayed to see the damage that had been done in that flashing moment of mob fury. The Corporal's ear was half-ripped off his skull and was bleeding great gouts of blood. His right arm hung grotesquely twisted at his side. One of his eyes was spouting blood, a great flap of skin hung over it.

The man was still not afraid. He lay there awaiting death, and Guiliano felt an overwhelming wave of tenderness for him. This was the man who had put him to the test, and who had confirmed his own immortality; this was the man who had certified the impotence of death. Guiliano pulled him to his feet and to the astonishment of all the others gave him a quick embrace. Then he pretended that he was merely helping the Corporal to stand erect.

Terranova was examining the pistol. "You are a very fortunate man," he said to Guiliano. "Only one bullet is defective."

Guiliano held out his hand for the gun. Terranova hesitated for a moment, then gave it to him. Guiliano turned to the Corporal. "Behave yourself," he said in a friendly tone, "and nothing will happen to you or your men. I guarantee it."

The Corporal, still too dazed and weak from his injuries to reply, did not even seem to understand what was being said.

Passatempo whispered to Pisciotta, "Hand me your knife and I'll finish him off."

Pisciotta said, "Guiliano gives the orders here and everybody obeys." Pisciotta said it matter-of-factly so as not to alert Passatempo that he was ready to kill him in an instant.

The Montelepre citizens who had been prisoners left hastily. They did not want to be witnesses to a massacre of carabinieri. Guiliano shepherded the Corporal and his fellow guards to the prison wing and locked them in the communal cell together. Then he led Pisciotta, Terranova and Passatempo on a search through the other buildings of the Bellampo Barracks. In the weapons shed they found rifles, pistols and machine pistols, with boxes of ammunition. They draped the weapons over their bodies and loaded the boxes of ammunition into the cart. From the living quarters they took some blankets and sleeping bags and Pisciotta threw two carabinieri uniforms into the cart just for good luck. Then, with Guiliano in the driver's seat, the can brimming over the top with looted goods, the other three men, walking with weapons ready, spread out to protect against any attack. They moved quickly down the road toward Castellammare. It took them over an hour to make their way to the house of the farmer who had loaned Hector Adonis the cart and to bury their loot in his pigpen. Then they helped the farmer cover his can with olive green paint stolen from an American Army supply depot.

Maresciallo Roccofino returned with his search party in time for dinner; the sun was falling out of the sky and it had never burned so brightly that day as the Maresciallo's rage burned at the sight of his men imprisoned in their own cages. The Maresciallo sent his armored car screaming down all the roads for a trace of the outlaws, but by that time Guiliano was deep in the sanctuary of his mountains.

Newspapers all over Italy gave the story great prominence. Just three days before, the killing of the two other carabinieri had also been front-page news, but then Guiliano had just been another desperate Sicilian bandit whose only claim to fame was ferocity. This exploit was another matter. He had won a battle of wits and tactics against the National Police. He had freed his friends and neighbors from what was obviously an unjust imprisonment. Journalists from Palermo, Naples, Rome and Milan descended on the town of Montelepre, interviewing Turi Guiliano's family and friends. His mother was photographed holding up Turi's guitar which she claimed he played like an angel. (This was not true; he was only beginning to play well enough to make his tune recognizable.) His former schoolmates confessed that Turi was such a great reader of books that he had been nicknamed "The Professor." The newspapers seized upon this with delight. A Sicilian bandit who could actually read. They mentioned his cousin Aspanu Pisciotta, who had joined him in his outlawry out of sheer friendship, and wondered at a man who could inspire such loyalty.

That an old photograph taken of him when he was seventeen showed him to be incredibly handsome in a Mediterranean manly fashion made the whole story irresistible. But perhaps what appealed to the Italian people most of all was Guiliano's act of mercy in sparing the Corporal who had tried to kill him. It was better than opera – it was more like the puppet shows so popular in Sicily, where the wooden figures never lost blood or had their flesh torn and mangled by bullets.

The newspapers only deplored the fact that Guiliano had chosen to free two such villains as Terranova and Passatempo, implying that two such evil companions might tarnish the image of this knight in shining armor.

Only the Milan newspaper pointed out that Salvatore "Turi" Guiliano had already killed three members of the National Police, and suggested that special measures should be taken for his apprehension, that a murderer should not be excused his crimes merely because he was handsome, well-read and could play the guitar.

CHAPTER 10

Don Croce was now fully aware of Turi Guiliano and full of admiration for him. What a true Mafioso youth. He meant the usage, of course, in the old traditional form: a Mafioso face, a Mafioso tree, a Mafioso woman, that is, a thing foremost in beauty in its particular form.

What a mailed fist this young man would be for Don Croce. What a warrior chief in the field. Don Croce forgave the fact that Guiliano was at present a thorn in his side. The two bandits imprisoned in Montelepre, the feared Passatempo and the clever Terranova, had been captured with the Don's approval and complicity. But all this could be forgiven, bygones were bygones; the Don never held a grudge that impaired his future profits. He would now track Turi Guiliano very carefully.

Deep in the mountains, Guiliano had no knowledge of his growing fame. He was too busy making plans to build his power. His first problem was the two bandit chiefs, Terranova and Passatempo. He questioned them closely about their capture and came to the conclusion they had been betrayed, informed upon. They swore their men had been faithful and many had been killed in the trap. Guiliano pondered all this and came to the conclusion that the Mafia, which had acted as fences and go-betweens for the band, had betrayed them. When he mentioned this to the two bandits they refused to believe it. The Friends of the Friends would never break the sacred code of omerta which was so central to their own survival. Guiliano did not insist. Instead he made them a formal offer to join his band.

He explained that his purpose was not only to survive but to become a political force. He emphasized that they would not rob the poor. Indeed half of the profit the band earned would be distributed to the needy in the provinces around the town of Montelepre reaching to the suburbs of Palermo. Terranova and Passatempo would rule their own subordinate bands but would be under Guiliano's overall command. These subordinate bands would not launch any money-making expedition without Guiliano's approval. Together they would have absolute rule over the provinces that held the great city of Palermo, the city of Monreale, and the towns of Montelepre, Partinico and Corleone. He impressed upon them that they would take the offensive against the carabinieri. That it would be the field police who would go in fear of their lives, not the bandits. They were astonished by this bravado.

Passatempo, an old-fashioned bandit who believed in rape, small-time extortion and the murder of shepherds, immediately began pondering how he could profit by this association and then murder Guiliano and take his share of the loot. Terranova, who liked Guiliano and was more grateful for his rescue, wondered how he could tactfully steer this talented young bandit on a more prudent path. Guiliano was now looking at them with a little smile, as if he could read their minds and was amused by what they thought.

Pisciotta was used to the grand ideas of his lifelong friend. He believed. If Turi Guiliano said he could do something, Aspanu Pisciotta believed he could do it. So now he listened.

In the bright morning sunlight that lit their mountains with gold they all three listened to Guiliano, spellbound as he told how they would lead the fight to make Sicilians a free people, uplift the poor and destroy the power of the Mafia, the nobility and Rome. They would have laughed at anyone else, but they remembered what everyone who saw it would always remember: the Corporal of the carabinieri raising the pistol to Guiliano's head. The quiet stare of Guiliano, his absolute confidence that he would not die, as he waited for the Corporal to pull the trigger. The mercy he had shown to the Corporal after the pistol misfired. These were all acts of a man who believed in his own immortality and forced others to share that belief. And so now they stared at the handsome young man, and they were impressed by his beauty, his courage and his innocence.

The next morning Guiliano led his three men, Aspanu Pisciotta, Passatempo and Terranova, down out of the mountains on a path that would let them out on the plains near the town of Castelvetrano. He came down very early to scout the ground. He and his men were dressed as laborers.

He knew that truck convoys of foodstuffs passed by here on the way to bringing their wares to the markets of Palermo. The problem was how to get the trucks to stop. They would be going at high speed to foil hijackers and the drivers might be armed.

Guiliano made his men hide in the underbrush of the road just outside Castelvetrano, then sat himself on a large white boulder in plain view. Men going out to work in the fields stared at him with stony faces. They saw the lupara he was carrying and hurried on. Guiliano wondered if any of them had recognized him. Then he saw a legend-painted large cart coming down the road, drawn by a single mule. The old man driving was known by sight to Guiliano. He was one of the line of professional carters so plentiful in rural Sicily. He hired out his rig to haul bamboo from the outlying villages back to the factory in town. Long ago he had been to Montelepre and had done some hauling of produce for Guiliano's father. Guiliano stepped into the middle of the road. The lupara dangled from his right hand. The driver recognized him though there was no expression on his face, just a momentary flicker of the eyes.

Guiliano greeted him with the familiar style he had used as a child, calling him Uncle. "Zu Peppino," he said. "This is a lucky day for both of us. I am here to make your fortune and you are here to help me lighten the load of the poor." He was genuinely delighted to see the old man and burst into laughter.

The old man didn't answer. He stared at Guiliano, his stony face waiting. Guiliano climbed up on the cart and sat beside him. He put the lupara out of sight in the wagon and then he laughed again with excitement. Because of Zu Peppino he was sure this would be a lucky day.

Guiliano relished the freshness of the late autumn, the beauty of the mountains on the horizon, the knowledge that his three men in the underbrush commanded the road with their guns. He explained his plan to Zu Peppino, who listened to him without a word or change of expression. That is, not until Guiliano told him what his reward would be: his cart full of food from the trucks. Then Zu Peppino grunted and said, "Turi Guiliano, you were always a fine, brave, young lad. Good-hearted, sensible, generous and sympathetic. You have not changed since you became a man." Guiliano remembered now that Zu Peppino was one of those old school Sicilians given to flowery speech. "Count on my help in this and all other things. Give my regards to your father who should be proud to have such a son."

The convoy of three trucks laden with foodstuffs appeared on the road at noontime. When they turned the curve that led straight out on the Partinico plain they had to stop. A cluster of carts and mules blocked the road completely. This had been contrived by Zu Peppino, to whom all the carters of the area owed favors and obedience.

The lead truck driver blew his horn and inched his truck so that it nudged the nearest cart. The man on the cart turned and gave him such a look of malevolence that he immediately halted his truck and waited patiently. He knew that these carters, despite their humble profession, were proud fierce men who, in a matter of honor, their right to the road over motorized vehicles, would stab him to death and go on their way with a song on their lips.

The other two trucks ground to a halt. The drivers got out. One of them was from the eastern end of Sicily and one was a foreigner; that is, he came from Rome. The Roman driver approached the carters unzipping his jacket, shouting angrily for them to get their damn mules and shitboxes out of the way. And leaving one hand inside his jacket.

Guiliano jumped off the cart. He didn't bother to get his lupara out of the wagon nor did he bother to draw the pistol in his belt. He gave a signal to his men waiting in the underbrush and they ran onto the road holding their weapons. Terranova split off to walk to the rearmost truck so that it could not be moved. Pisciotta slid down the embankment and confronted the raging Roman truck driver.

Meanwhile Passatempo, more excitable than the others, yanked the first trucker out of his vehicle and threw him on the road at Guiliano's feet. Guiliano extended a hand and lifted him up. By that time, Pisciotta had herded the driver of the rear truck up to join the other two. The Roman had withdrawn his empty hand from his jacket and erased the anger from his face. Guiliano smiled with genuine good will and said, "This is a fortunate day for the three of you. You won't have to make the long trip to Palermo. My carters will unload the trucks and distribute the food to the needy of this district, under my supervision of course. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Guiliano."

The three drivers immediately became apologetic and affable. They were in no hurry, they said. They had all the time in the world. In fact, it was time for their lunch. Their trucks were comfortable. The weather was not too warm. Indeed, it was a happy chance, a stroke of fortune.

Guiliano saw their fear. "Don't worry," he said. "I don't kill men who earn bread by the sweat of their brow. You will join me for lunch while my people do their work, and then you will go home to your wives and children and tell them of your good fortune. When the police question you, help them as little as possible and you will earn my gratitude."

Guiliano paused. It was important to him that these men should feel no shame or hatred. It was important that they should report their good treatment. For there would be others.

They let themselves be herded to the shade of a giant boulder by the side of the road. They voluntarily offered Guiliano their pistols without being searched. And they sat like angels as the carters unloaded their trucks. When the carters were finished, there was still one fully loaded truck whose contents could not fit into their wagons. Guiliano put Pisciotta and Passatempo into this vehicle with a driver and told Pisciotta to deliver food to the farm laborers of Montelepre. Guiliano himself and Terranova would supervise the distribution of the food in the district of Castelvetrano and the town of Partinico. Later they would rendezvous at the cave on top of Monte d'Ora.

With this one deed Guiliano was on the road to winning the support of the whole countryside. What other bandit had given his spoils to the poor? The next day the newspapers all over Sicily had stories about the Robin Hood bandit. Only Passatempo grumbled that they had done a day's work for nothing. Pisciotta and Terranova understood that their band had gained a thousand supporters against Rome.

What they did not know was that the goods had been destined for the warehouse of Don Croce.

In only a month Guiliano had informers everywhere – telling him what rich merchants traveled with black market money, the habits of certain noble persons and those few wicked people who gossiped with highly placed police officials. And so the rumor came to Guiliano of the jewels that the Duchess of Alcamo sometimes flaunted. It was said that for most of the year they were kept in a bank vault in Palermo but that she took them out on some occasions to wear to parties. To learn more about what he sensed might be a rich prize, Guiliano dispatched Aspanu Pisciotta to the Alcamo estate.

Twenty miles southwest of Montelepre, the estate of the Duke and Duchess of Alcamo was walled, its gates manned by armed guards. The Duke also paid "rent" to the Friends of the Friends, which guaranteed that his livestock would not be stolen, his house burglarized or any member of his family kidnapped. In ordinary times and with ordinary criminals this would have made him safer than the Pope in the Vatican.

In early November the great estates of Sicily harvest their grapes, and to do so hire laborers from the nearby villages. Pisciotta reported to the town square and let himself be recruited for work on the Duke of Alcamo's estate. He spent the first day in backbreaking labor, filling baskets with clusters of black purple fruit. There were more than a hundred people in the vineyard – men, women and small children who sang together as they worked. At midday, a huge lunch was served outdoors.

Pisciotta sat alone, watching the others. He noticed one young woman who brought a tray of bread from the castle. She was pretty but pale; obviously she rarely worked in the sun. Also she was better dressed than the other women. But what struck Pisciotta was the disdainful pout on her face, and the way she avoided all contact with the other workers. He learned that this girl was the personal maid of the Duchess.

Pisciotta knew immediately that she would serve his purposes better than anyone else. Guiliano, who knew Pisciotta's ways, had ordered him strictly not to shame any of the local girls in the process of getting information; but Pisciotta considered Turi too much a romantic and too innocent in the ways of the world. The prize was too rich, the girl too pretty.

When she came out with another huge tray of bread, he lifted it out of her hands and carried it for her. She was startled, and when he asked her name, she refused to answer.

Pisciotta put down the tray and grasped her by the arm. He gave her a ferocious smile. "When I ask you a question, answer me. If you don't, I'll bury you in that mountain of grapes." And then he laughed to show he was joking. He gave her his most charming smile, spoke in his gentlest voice. "You're the most beautiful girl I've seen in Sicily," he said. "I had to speak to you."

The maid was both terrified and enticed by him. She noted the dangerous cutting knife dangling from his waist, the way he carried himself, as if he too were a duke. Now she was interested. She told him her name was Graziella.

When the workday was finished Pisciotta boldly knocked at the back kitchen of the castle and asked for Graziella. The old woman who opened the door listened to him, then said curtly, "The servants are not allowed to receive visitors." She slammed the door in his face.

The next day Pisciotta took the tray Graziella was carrying and whispered to her that he wanted to see her after work. He slipped a little gold bracelet over her wrist as he caressed her arm. She promised she would slip out after dark and meet him in the empty vineyard.

That night Aspanu Pisciotta wore the special silk shirt tailored for him in Palermo. He waited for her in a valley formed by mountains of cut grapes on every side. When Graziella came to him he embraced her, and when she lifted her mouth to be kissed he brushed her lips with his and put his hand between her legs at the same time. She tried to twist away but he gripped her firmly. They kissed more deeply and he lifted her woolen skirt, surprised to find that she was wearing silken undergarments. She must have borrowed them from the Duchess, Pisciotta thought. She was a bold little piece, and a bit of a thief.

He pulled her down to the blanket he had spread on the ground. They lay there together. She was kissing him passionately and he could feel her response through the silk underpants.

With a quick movement he pulled them down and the warm wet flesh was in his hands. She was unbuckling his belt and as they continued to kiss he pushed his trousers down to his ankles. He rolled over on top of her, took his hand away, and then thrust inside her. Graziella gave a little moan and bucked upward with astonishing strength and Aspanu Pisciotta felt himself rising and falling, rising and falling, and then suddenly Graziella gave a little shriek and lay still. Damn, Pisciotta thought, she was too quick. But it was just as well. His main purpose was information, his own satisfaction could wait.

They wrapped themselves in the blanket and hugged each other. He told her that he was working to earn some money to enter the University of Palermo, that his family wanted him to be a lawyer. He wanted her to think he was a good catch. Then he asked her about herself, how she liked her work, what kind of people were her fellow servants? Gradually he directed the conversation to her mistress, the Duchess.

Graziella put Aspanu's hand back between her legs and then told him how beautiful the Duchess looked dressed in her fine clothes and jewelry, and how she, Graziella, was a favorite and was allowed to wear the out-of-fashion frocks the Duchess discarded.

"I would like to see you in your mistress's finery. Does she let you try on her jewels, too?"

"Well, on Christmas Eve she always lets me wear a necklace for the evening." So as Guiliano had guessed, the jewels would be in the house for the holiday season. He needed to find out one more thing, but suddenly she was straddling him, trying to keep the blanket over her shoulders. Aspanu was fully aroused, the blanket fell away, the skirt flew over Graziella's head and the force of their thrusts carried them into the wall of grapes. When they were done, their exhausted bodies were covered with the sticky juice of the fruit and of their own bodies.

Aspanu said, "Fresh air is all very well, but when can I come into the house and make love to you properly?"

"Not while the Duke is here. When he goes on his trips to Palermo, the household is more lax. Next month, he will go away for several weeks, just before Christmas."

Aspanu smiled. And now that he had all the information he needed, he paid full attention to the job at hand. He pounced on Graziella's body and pinned her again to the blanket, making love with a ferocity that made the girl helpless with pleasure, and frightened her a little. Just enough that she would want more of him in the month ahead.

Five days before Christmas, Guiliano, Passatempo, Pisciotta, and Terranova pulled up before the gates of the Alcamo Estate in a wagon drawn by mules. They were dressed in the hunting garb of well-to-do peasant landowners, bought in Palermo with the spoils of their truck raid: corduroy trousers, red woolen shirts, heavy shooting jackets that held boxes of bullets. Two security guards barred their way. Since it was broad daylight they were not alert and kept their weapons on their shoulders.

Guiliano strode toward them briskly. He was unarmed except for the pistol hidden beneath his rough carter's coat. He smiled at them broadly. "Gentlemen," he said. "My name is Guiliano and I've come to wish your charming Duchess a good Christmas and beg for alms to help the poor."

The guards were frozen with astonishment when they heard the name Guiliano. Then they started to swing their guns loose. But by that time Passatempo and Terranova had them covered with machine pistols. Pisciotta relieved the guards of their guns and threw the weapons into the wagon. Passatempo and Terranova were left to stroll with the guards in front of the gates.

The approach to the mansion consisted of an enormous stone courtyard. In one corner a group of chickens fluttered around an old woman servant scattering grain. Beyond the manor house, the four children of the Duchess were playing in a garden, supervised by governesses in black cotton dresses. Guiliano walked up the path to the house, Pisciotta beside him. His information was correct, there were no other guards. Beyond the garden was a far larger piece of land, which served to grow vegetables and held a grove of olive trees. In this field six laborers toiled. He rang the bell and then pushed the door just as the maid was opening it. Graziella was startled by Pisciotta's appearance at the front door and stepped aside.

Guiliano said gently, "Don't be alarmed. Tell your mistress we are sent here by the Duke on business. I must speak to her." Still puzzled, Graziella led them into the drawing room where the Duchess was reading. The Duchess waved the maid from the room, annoyed by the unannounced intrusion and said sharply, "My husband is away. Can I help you?"

Guiliano could not answer her. He was stunned by the beauty of the room. It was the largest he had ever seen and, more amazingly, it was round rather than square. Golden drapes guarded the huge French windows, the ceiling above was hollowed to a dome and decorated with frescoes of cherubim. Books were everywhere – on the sofa, the coffee tables and in special cases along the walls. Great massive paintings in rich oils hung on the walls and huge vases of flowers were everyplace. Silver and gold boxes were scattered on tables that kneeled before massive stuffed chairs and sofas. The room could hold a hundred people easily and the only person using it was this solitary woman dressed in white silk. Sunlight and air and the shouts of the children playing in the garden came through the open windows. For the first time Guiliano understood the seductiveness of wealth, that money could create such beauty, and he was reluctant to mar that beauty by any crassness or cruelty. He would do what he must do and not leave a scar on this lovely scene.

The Duchess, waiting patiently for an answer, was struck by this young man's handsome virility. She saw he was impressed by the beauty of the room, and she was a little annoyed that he did not notice her own beauty. She thought it was too bad he was so obviously a peasant and did not move in her circles, where a little innocent flirtatiousness would not have been inappropriate. All this made her say more charmingly than she ordinarily would, "Young man, I'm so sorry, but if it's business about the estate you will have to come back another time. My husband is not at home."

Guiliano looked at her. He felt that flush of antagonism a poor man feels for a rich woman who is in some way asserting her superiority to him because of her wealth and social position. He bowed politely, noticing the spectacular ring on her finger, and said with an ironic submissiveness, "My business is with you. My name is Guiliano."

But the irony of his submissiveness was wasted on the Duchess, who was too accustomed to the slavishness of her servants. She took it as a matter of course. She was a cultured woman, interested in books and music, and took no interest in the daily affairs of Sicily. She rarely read the local newspapers; she considered them barbarous. So she only said courteously, "I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Have we met in Palermo? At the opera perhaps?"

Aspanu Pisciotta, who had been observing the scene with amusement, laughed openly and strolled over to the French windows so as to intercept any servant who might come from that direction.

Guiliano, a little angered by Pisciotta's laughter but charmed by the Duchess's ignorance, said firmly, "My dear Duchess, we have never met. I am a bandit. My full name is Salvatore Guiliano. I think of myself as the Champion of Sicily, and my purpose in coming to see you today is to ask you to donate your jewelry to the poor so that they may enjoy and celebrate the birth of Christ on Christmas day."

The Duchess smiled unbelievingly. This young boy whose face and body aroused an unfamiliar hunger in her could not possibly mean her harm. And now with the hint of danger she was positively intrigued. She would tell this story at the parties in Palermo. So she said with an innocent smile, "My jewels are in the bank vaults in Palermo. Whatever cash is in the house you may have. With my blessing." No one had ever doubted her word in her whole life. Even as a little girl she had never lied. This was the first time.

Guiliano looked at the diamond pendant around her throat. He knew she was lying, but he was reluctant to do what he must do. Then he nodded to Pisciotta, who put his fingers between his teeth and whistled three times. In just a few minutes Passatempo appeared at the French windows. His short, squat ugly figure, his evil scarred face could have come out of the puppet shows. His face was broad with hardly any forehead, and his thick bushy black hair and bulging eyebrows made him look like a gorilla. He smiled at the Duchess and showed huge discolored teeth.

The appearance of the third bandit finally frightened the Duchess. She undid her necklace and handed it over to Guiliano. "Will that satisfy you?" she said.

"No," Guiliano said. "My dear Duchess, I'm a soft-hearted man. But my colleagues are different propositions altogether. My friend Aspanu, though handsome, is as cruel as that little mustache he wears that breaks so many hearts. And the man at the window, though he is my subordinate, gives me nightmares. Don't make me unleash them. They will sweep into your garden like hawks and carry your children away into the mountains. Now bring me the rest of your diamonds."

The Duchess fled into her bedroom and returned in a few minutes with a box of jewelry. She had been quick-witted enough to hide a few valuable pieces before she brought it out. She gave the box to Guiliano. He thanked her graciously. Then he turned to Pisciotta. "Aspanu," he said, "the Duchess may have forgotten a few things. Go take a look in the bedroom just to be certain." Pisciotta found the hidden jewels almost immediately and brought them to Guiliano.

Guiliano meanwhile had opened the jewelry box and his heart jumped with elation at the sight of the precious gems. He knew the contents of this box would feed the entire city of Montelepre for months. And it was a greater source of joy that they had been bought by the Duke with the money sweated from the hides of his laborers. Then as the Duchess was wringing her hands he noticed again the huge emerald on her finger.

"My dear Duchess," he said, "how could you be so foolish as to try to cheat me by hiding those other pieces? I would have expected that from some miserly peasant who slaved for his treasure. But how could you risk your life and those of your children for two pieces of jewelry that you would no more miss than your husband the Duke would miss the hat on his head? Now without any fuss, give me that ring you wear on your finger."

The Duchess was in tears. "My dear young man," she said, "please let me keep this ring. I will send you its value in money. But my husband gave it to me as an engagement gift. I could not bear to be without it. It would break my heart."

Again Pisciotta laughed. He did so deliberately. He was afraid that Turi would let her keep the ring out of the sentimentality of his own heart. And the emerald was obviously of the highest value.

But Guiliano had no such sentimentality. Pisciotta would always remember the look in his eye when Turi took the Duchess's arm roughly and pulled the emerald ring off her trembling hand. He stepped back quickly and then he put the ring on the little finger of his left hand.

Turi saw the Duchess was blushing and there were tears in her eyes. His manner was once again courtly when he said, "In honor of your memories I will never sell this ring – I will wear it myself." The Duchess searched his face for a look of irony, but there was none.

But it was a magic moment for Turi Guiliano. For when he slipped it on his finger, he felt the transference of power. With this ring he wedded himself to his destiny. It was the symbol of the power he would win from the world of the rich. In that pool of dark green, bounded by its circle of gold, still smelling of the perfume of a beautiful woman who had worn it without ceasing for many years, he had captured a tiny essence of life that could never be his.

Don Croce listened without saying a word.

The Duke of Alcamo was making his complaint to Don Croce in person. Had he not paid his "rent" to the Friends of the Friends? Had they not guaranteed his immunity against all forms of theft? What were things coming to? In the old days nobody would have dared. And what would Don Croce do now to recover the jewelry? The Duke had reported the theft to the authorities, though this was futile he knew and might displease Don Croce. But there was some insurance to be collected; perhaps the government in Rome would take this bandit Guiliano seriously.

Don Croce reflected that it was time to take him very seriously indeed. He said to the Duke, "If I recovered your jewelry would you pay a quarter of their value?"

The Duke was furious. "First I pay you the rent to keep me and my possessions safe. Then, when you fail in your duty, you ask me to pay ransom. How can you hope to keep the respect of your clients if you do business in this way?"

Don Croce nodded. "I must admit you speak with reason. But think of Salvatore Guiliano as a force of nature, as a scourge of God. Surely you cannot expect the Friends of the Friends to guard you against earthquakes, volcanoes, floods? In time Guiliano will be controlled, I guarantee. But think: You pay the ransom I will arrange. You will have your protection without paying my usual rent for the next five years, and under the agreement Guiliano will not strike again. And why should he, since I and he presume you will have the good sense to keep these valuables in the bank vaults of Palermo? Women are too innocent – they do not know the lust and greed with which men pursue the material goods of this world." He paused for a moment to allow the slight smile that had appeared on the Duke's face to disappear. Then he said, "If you calculate the rent to pay for the protection of your whole estate for five years in the troubled times ahead, you will see that you have lost very little by this misfortune."

The Duke did think it over. Don Croce was quite right about the hard times that lay ahead. He would lose more than a little by ransoming the jewels, despite the remission of five years' "rent"; who was to say that Don Croce would be alive for another five years or that he could contain Guiliano? But still it was the best bargain to be made. It would prevent the Duchess from wheedling more jewelry out of him in the years to come and that would be an enormous savings. He would have to sell another piece of land, but his ancestors had been doing that for generations to pay for their follies, and he still had thousands of acres left. The Duke agreed.

Don Croce summoned Hector Adonis. The next day Adonis made a trip to visit his godson. He explained his mission. He was absolutely straightforward. "You won't get a better price even if you sell the jewelry to thieves in Palermo," he said. "And even then it will take time and you certainly won't get the money before Christmas, which I know is your wish. And beyond that you will earn the good will of Don Croce which it is important for you to have. You have, after all, caused him a loss of respect, which he will forgive if you do him this favor."

Guiliano smiled at his godfather. He cared nothing for Don Croce's good will; after all, one of his dreams was to slay the dragon of the Mafia in Sicily. But he had already sent emissaries to Palermo to find buyers for the stolen jewelry, and it was clear that it would be a long and torturous process. So he agreed to the bargain. But he refused to give up the emerald ring.

Before Adonis left he abandoned finally his role as a teacher of romances to Guiliano. For the first time he spoke to him of the realities of Sicilian life. "My dear godson," he said, "no one admires your qualities more than I do. I love your high-mindedness, which I hope I helped instill in you. But now we must speak of survival. You can never hope to win against the Friends of the Friends. For the last thousand years, like a million spiders, they have spun a gigantic web over all of life in Sicily. Don Croce now stands in the center of that web. He admires you, he wants your friendship, he wants you to grow rich with him. But you must bend sometimes to his will. You can have your empire, but it must exist within his web. One thing is certain – you cannot directly oppose him. If you do so, history itself will help Don Croce destroy you."

And so the jewelry was returned to the Duke. Guiliano kept half the money from the jewelry to be distributed among Pisciotta, Passatempo and Terranova. They eyed the emerald ring on Guiliano's finger but said nothing, for Guiliano refused to take any of the money from the sale of the jewels.

The other half of the money Guiliano was determined to distribute among the poor shepherds who guarded the flocks of sheep and cattle that belonged to the rich, the old widows and orphan children, all the poor around him.

He gave out most of the money through intermediaries, but one fine day he filled the pockets of his sheepskin jacket with packets of lire notes. He also filled a canvas sack with money and decided to walk through the villages between Montelepre and Piani dei Greci with Terranova at his side.

In one village there were three old women who were almost starving. He gave each of them a packet of lire. They wept and kissed his hands. In another village was a man who was about to lose his farm and land because he could not make the mortgage payments. Guiliano left him enough to pay off the mortgage in full.

In another village he took over the local bakery and grocery store, paying the owner for the goods, and distributed bread and cheese and pasta to all the village people.

In the next town he gave money to the parents of a sick child so they could take him to the hospital in Palermo and pay for the visits of the local doctor. He also attended the wedding of a young couple and gave them a generous dowry.

But what he loved most was to give money to the ragged young children who thronged the streets of all the little towns in Sicily. Many of them knew Guiliano. They gathered around him as he distributed the packets of money telling them to bring it to their parents. Guiliano watched them as they joyfully ran to their homes.

He only had a few packets of money left when he decided to visit his mother before nightfall. Crossing a field behind his home he encountered a little boy and a little girl who were crying. They had lost money entrusted to them by their parents and said the carabinieri had taken it from them. Guiliano was amused by this little tragedy and gave them one of the two packets of money he had left. And then, because the little girl was so pretty and he couldn't bear to think of her being punished, he gave her a note for her parents.

The little girl's parents were not the only ones who were grateful. The people in the towns of Borgetto, Corleone, Partinico, Monreale, and Piani dei Greci began to call him the "King of Montelepre" to show their loyalty.

Don Croce was happy despite the loss of the five years' "rent" from the Duke. For though Don Croce had told Adonis that the Duke would pay only twenty percent of the value of the jewels, he had collected twenty-five percent from the Duke, and put five percent in his pocket.

What delighted him even more was his satisfaction that he had spotted Guiliano so early and judged him so accurately. What a fine upstanding lad. Who could believe that one so young could see so clearly, act so wisely, listen so temperately to older and wiser heads? And yet all this with a cool intelligence that guarded his own interests, which of course the Don admired, for who would wish to associate himself with a fool? Yes, the Don thought Turi Guiliano would be his strong right arm. And with time, a beloved titular son.

Turi Guiliano saw clearly through all these machinations around him. He knew his godfather was sincerely concerned about his welfare. But that did not mean he trusted the older man's judgment. Guiliano knew he was not yet strong enough to fight the Friends of the Friends; indeed he needed their help. But he was under no illusions about the long run. Eventually, if he listened to his godfather, he would have to become a vassal to Don Croce. This he was determined he would never do. For now, he must bide his time.

CHAPTER 11

Guiliano's band now numbered thirty men. Some of these were former members of the Passatempo and Terranova bands. Some were citizens of Montelepre who had been freed from prison by Guiliano's raid. They had found there was to be no forgiveness by the authorities despite their innocence; they were still being hunted. They decided to be hunted with Guiliano rather than be tracked down alone and friendless.

One fine April morning Guiliano's informants in Montelepre sent word that a dangerous-looking man, perhaps a police spy, was making inquiries about joining the band. He was waiting in the central square. Guiliano sent Terranova and four men into Montelepre to investigate. If the man was a spy they would kill him; if he was someone of use, they would recruit him.

Early in the afternoon, Terranova returned and told Guiliano, "We have the fellow and before we shoot him, we thought you might like to make his acquaintance."

Guiliano laughed when he saw the burly figure dressed in the traditional peasant Sicilian working garb. "Well, old friend, did you think I could ever forget your face. Have you come with better bullets this time?"

It was the Corporal of the carabinieri, Canio Silvestro, who had fired his pistol at Guiliano's head during the famous jail-break.

Silvestro's strong scarred face was intent. The face appealed to Guiliano for some reason. He had a soft spot in his heart for this man who had helped him prove his immortality.

Silvestro said, "I've come to join up. I can be invaluable to you." He said this proudly as one who is about to make a gift. This also pleased Guiliano. He let Silvestro tell his story.

After the raid on the jail, Corporal Silvestro had been sent to Palermo to face a court-martial for dereliction of duty. His Maresciallo had been furious with him and had interrogated him closely before recommending prosecution. Oddly enough the one circumstance that inflamed the Maresciallo's suspicions was the Corporal's attempted shooting of Guiliano. The cause of the misfire had been found to be defective ammunition. The Maresciallo claimed that the Corporal had loaded his gun with that one harmless bullet knowing it was defective. That the whole attempted resistance had been a charade and that Corporal Silvestro had helped Guiliano plan the jailbreak and stationed his guards to help the raid succeed.

Guiliano interrupted. "How did they think you could have known the bullets were defective?"

Silvestro looked sheepish. "I should have known. I was the armorer in the infantry, an expert." His face became grim and he shrugged. "I had a lapse, true. They made me a desk man and I didn't pay too much attention to my real business. But I can be valuable to you. I can be your armorer. I can check all your weapons and repair them. I can make sure your ammunition is properly handled so that your supply dumps don't blow up. I can modify your weapons so that they will suit the use you put them to, here in the mountains."

"Tell me the rest of your story," Guiliano said. He was studying the man closely. This could be a plan to infiltrate his band with an informer. He could see that Pisciotta, Passatempo and Terranova were full of distrust.

Silvestro went on. "They were all fools and they were all frightened women. The Maresciallo knew that it was stupid of him to take most of the men into the mountains when we had a barracks full of prisoners. The carabinieri regard Sicily as some foreign occupied country. I used to protest against that attitude, and that got me into their bad books. And the authorities in Palermo wanted to protect their Maresciallo – they were responsible for him after all. It would look better if the Bellampo Barracks had been betrayed from within instead of taken over by men who were braver and more clever. They didn't court-martial me. They told me to resign. They said it would be without prejudice, but I know them better than that. I'll never get a government job again. I'm fitted for nothing else and I'm a Sicilian patriot. So I thought to myself – what can I do with my life? And I said to myself – I will go to Guiliano."

Guiliano sent to the cooking site for food and drink and then conferred with his chiefs.

Passatempo was gruff and positive. "What kind of fools do they think we are? Shoot him and throw his body off the cliff. We don't need carabinieri in our band."

Pisciotta saw that Guiliano was once again taken by the Corporal. He knew his friend's impulsive emotions, so he said carefully, "It's most likely a trick. But even if it's not, why take the chance? We'll have to worry all the time. There will always be doubt. Why not just send him back?"

Terranova said, "He knows our camp. He's seen some of our men and he knows their number. That is valuable information."

Guiliano said, "He's a true Sicilian. He acts out of a sense of honor. I can't believe he would act the part of a spy." He saw that they all smiled at his innocence.

Pisciotta said, "Remember, he tried to kill you. He had a concealed weapon and he was a prisoner and he tried to kill you out of sheer temper and with no hope of escape."

Guiliano thought, And that's what makes him valuable to me. Aloud he said, "Doesn't that prove he is a man of honor? He was defeated but felt that he had to die avenging himself. And what harm can he do? He'll be a member of the common band – we won't take him into our confidence. And we'll keep a close eye on him. I'll give him my personal attention. When the time is ripe we'll put him to a test that he must refuse if he is a spy for the carabinieri. Leave him to me."

Later that evening when he told Silvestro that he was now a member of the band, the man simply said, "You can count on me for anything." He understood that Guiliano had again saved him from death.

At Eastertime Guiliano visited his family. Pisciotta had argued against this, saying the police might set a trap. Easter in Sicily had always been a traditional death day for bandits. The police counted on the deep ties of family to bring outlaws sneaking down from the mountains to visit their loved ones. But Guiliano's spies brought word that the Maresciallo himself would be visiting his family on the mainland and that half the garrison at the Bellampo Barracks had been given leave to celebrate the holiday in Palermo. Guiliano decided that he would bring enough men with him to make it safe. He slipped into Montelepre on Holy Saturday.

He had sent word of his visit a few days before and his mother had prepared a feast. That night he slept in his childhood bed, and the next day, when his mother went to morning Mass, Guiliano accompanied her to church. He had a bodyguard of six men who were also visiting their families in the town but had orders to accompany Guiliano wherever he went.

As he came out of the church with his mother, his six bodyguards were waiting for him with Pisciotta. Aspanu's face was white with fury as he said, "You have been betrayed Turi. The Maresciallo has returned from Palermo with twenty extra men to arrest you. They have your mother's house surrounded. They think you're inside."

Guiliano felt for one moment a kind of anger at his own rashness and stupidity and resolved he would never be so careless again. Not that the Maresciallo with his twenty men could have captured him even in his mother's house. His bodyguards would have ambushed them, and there would have been a bloody battle. But that would have spoiled the spirit of his Easter homecoming. The day Christ had risen was not the day to break the peace.

He kissed his mother goodbye and told her to return home and freely admit to the police that she had left him at the church. In that way she could not be charged with any conspiracy. He told her not to worry, that he and his men were heavily armed and would easily escape; there would not even be any fighting. The carabinieri would not dare to follow them into the mountains.

Guiliano and his men left without even being sighted by the police. That night in the mountain camp, Guiliano questioned Pisciotta. How could the Maresciallo have known about the visit? Who was the informer? Everything must be done to find out. "That will be your special task, Aspanu," he said. "And if there is one, there may be others. I don't care how long it takes or how much money we spend, you must find out."

Even as a child, Pisciotta had never liked the buffoonish barber of Montelepre. Frisella was one of those barbers who cut hair to suit his mood of the day, one time modishly, another time puckishly, another time with the extreme conservativeness of a peasant farmer. By varying his style he put forward his claim to being an artist. He was also too familiar with his superiors and too patronizing to his equals. With children he was playful in that particularly spiteful Sicilian style which is one of the less pleasant sides of the island character; he would nip their ears with his scissors and sometimes cut their hair so short that their heads looked like billiard balls. So it was with grim satisfaction that Pisciotta reported to Guiliano that Frisella the barber was the police spy and had broken the sacred code of omerta. It was obvious that the Maresciallo was not making a random strike that Easter day. He must have received information that Turi would be there. And how could he have gotten that information since Turi had sent word to his family only twenty-four hours before?

Pisciotta used his own informers in the village to check on every step the Maresciallo had taken during that twenty-four hours. And since only Guiliano's mother and father had known about the visit, he questioned them casually to see if they might have accidentally given anything away.

Maria Lombardo soon smelled out his intention. She said to him, "I spoke to no one, not even my neighbors. I stayed in the house and cooked so that Turi would have an Easter feast."

But Guiliano's father had gone to the barber Frisella on the morning of his son's visit. The old man was a little vain, and he wanted to look his best on the rare occasions when his son Turi came to visit at the house in Montelepre. Frisella had shaved and barbered the old man and made his usual jokes. "Was Signor perhaps going into Palermo to visit certain young ladies there? Was he receiving important visitors from Rome?" He, Frisella, would make Signor Guiliano look handsome enough to receive a "king." And Pisciotta visualized the setting. Guiliano's father with a little secretive smile on his face as he grumbled that a man could look like a gentleman for no reason except his own satisfaction. And yet the swelling of importance at knowing his son was famous enough to be called the "King of Montelepre." Perhaps the old man had come in on other occasions and the barber had learned that Guiliano visited the same day and so put two and two together.

Maresciallo Roccofino dropped into the barber shop every morning for his daily shave. There did not seem to be any conversation that could convey information from the barber to the policeman. But Pisciotta was certain. He sent spies to the barber shop to lounge around all day and play cards with Frisella at the little table he kept out on the street. They drank wine, talked politics and shouted insults at friends who passed by. Over the weeks Pisciotta's spies gathered more information.

Frisella always whistled the tune of one of his favorite opera arias when he shaved and cut hair; sometimes the large oval-shaped radio would play with recordings from Rome. This would always be the case when he attended the Maresciallo. And there would always be a time when he leaned over the police officer and whispered something. If you were not suspicious it was only a barber being deferential to the wishes of his customer's pleasure. But then one of Pisciotta's spies got a look at the lire note the Maresciallo used to pay for his service. They noticed it was folded, and the barber put it in a special watch fob pocket in his vest, underneath his white coat. When the spy and one of his helpers confronted Frisella and forced him to show the note, it was of ten thousand lire denomination. The barber swore it was for his services over the past few months, and the spies pretended to believe him.

Pisciotta gave his evidence to Guiliano in the presence of Terranova, Passatempo and Corporal Silvestro. They were in their camp in the mountains, and Guiliano went to the edge of one of the cliffs that overlooked Montelepre and stared down at the town.

Master Frisella, the barber, had been a part of that town ever since Guiliano could remember. As a little boy he had gone to Frisella to have his hair cut for Holy Confirmation, and Frisella had given him a small silver coin as a gift. He knew Frisella's wife and son. Frisella had shouted jokes to him in the street and always asked after his mother and father.

But now Frisella had broken the sacred law of omerta. He had sold secrets to the enemy; he was a paid informant of the police. How could he have been so foolish? And what was he, Guiliano, to do with him now? It was one thing to kill the field police in hot combat, it was another thing to execute, in cold blood, an avuncular older man. Turi Guiliano was only twenty-one years of age and this was the first time he had to use the cold cruelty so necessary in great endeavors.

He turned back to the others. "Frisella has known me all my life. He gave me lemon ices when I was a child, do you remember, Aspanu? And maybe he just gossips with the Maresciallo, doesn't really give him information. It's not as if we told him I was coming to town and then he told the police. Maybe he just gives theories and accepts the money because it is offered. Who would refuse?"

Passatempo was looking at Guiliano with narrowed eyes, as a hyena would regard the body of a dying lion, wondering if the time was ripe and safe to dash in and tear off a piece of flesh. Terranova shook his head slightly, a smile on his lips as if he were listening to a child tell some foolish story. But only Pisciotta answered him.

"He's as guilty as a priest in a whorehouse," Pisciotta said. "We could give him a warning," Guiliano said. "We could bring him over to our side and use him to give false information to the authorities when it suits our purpose." Even as he spoke, he knew he was wrong. He could no longer afford such gestures. Pisciotta said wrathfully, "Why not give him a present, a sack of grain or a chicken while you're at it? Turi, our lives and the lives of all the men out there in the mountains depend on your courage, on your will, on your leadership. How can we follow if you forgive a traitor like Frisella? A man who breaks the law of omerta. The Friends of the Friends would have his liver and heart hanging from the barber pole by this time and on less evidence. If you let him go then every greedy traitor will know he can inform once without punishment. One of those 'onces' could be our death."

Terranova spoke judiciously. "Frisella is a stupid buffoon, a greedy and treacherous man. In ordinary times he would only be the village nuisance. Now he is dangerous. To let him off would be foolhardy – he is not intelligent enough to mend his ways. He would think we are not serious people. And so would many others. Turi, you have suppressed the activities of the Friends of the Friends in the town of Montelepre. Their man Quintana moves very cautiously, though he makes some imprudent statements. If you let Frisella off with anything less than death, the Friends would think you weak and test you further. The carabinieri would become bolder, less afraid, more dangerous. Even the citizens of Montelepre would think less of you. Frisella cannot live." He said this last almost with regret.

Guiliano listened to them thoughtfully. They were right. He was conscious of Passatempo's look and read to the man's heart. Passatempo could never be trusted if Frisella lived. There was no going back to being one of Charlemagne's knights, there was no going back to resolving differences in honorable combat on the Fields of the Cloths of Gold. Frisella would have to be executed and in such a way as to achieve maximum terror.

Guiliano had an idea. He turned to Corporal Silvestro and asked, "What do you think? Surely the Maresciallo would have told you his informants. Is the barber guilty?"

Silvestro shrugged, his face impassive. He did not speak. They all recognized that it was a point of honor for him not to speak, not to betray his former trust. That his not answering was his way of telling them that the barber certainly had some contact with the Maresciallo. Still Guiliano had to be sure. He smiled at the Corporal and said, "Now is the time to prove your loyalty to us. We will all go to Montelepre together and you will personally execute the barber in the public square."

Aspanu Pisciotta marveled at his friend's cunning. Guiliano had always surprised him. He had always acted nobly and yet he could plant a trap worthy of Iago. They had all come to know the Corporal as a truthful and honest man with a sense of fair play. He would never consent to perform the execution if he was not sure the barber was guilty, no matter what the cost to him. Pisciotta saw that Guiliano had a little smile on his face – that if the Corporal refused, the barber would be judged innocent and go free.

But the Corporal stroked his bushy mustache and looked them all in the eye. He said, "Frisella cuts hair so badly he deserves to die for that alone. I'll be ready in the morning."

At dawn Guiliano and Pisciotta and ex-Corporal Silvestro took the road down to Montelepre. An hour before them Passatempo had left with a squad of ten men to seal off all streets emptying into the central square of the town. Terranova was left in charge of the camp and prepared to lead a strong band into the town if they ran into serious trouble.

It was still early morning when Guiliano and Pisciotta entered the town square. The cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks had been flushed with water and some children were playing around the raised platform where the donkey and mare had been mated on that long-ago fateful day. Guiliano told Silvestro to chase the children out of the square so they could not witness what was about to happen. Silvestro did so with such temper that the children scattered like chickens.

When Guiliano and Pisciotta entered the barber shop with machine pistols at the ready, Frisella was cutting the hair of a wealthy landowner of the province. The barber assumed they had come to kidnap his customer and he whipped off the cloth with a cunning smile as if to present a prize. The landowner, an old Sicilian peasant who had grown rich during the war by selling livestock to the Italian Army, stood up proudly. But Pisciotta motioned him to one side and said with a grin, "You don't have enough money to pay our price and for us to take the trouble."

Guiliano was extremely alert and kept his eyes on Frisella. The barber was still holding his scissors. "Put them down," he said. "You won't need to cut hair where you're going. Now get outside."

Frisella dropped the scissors and turned his wide buffoon's face into a clown's grimace as he attempted to smile. "Turi," he said, "I have no money, I've just opened the shop. I'm a poor man."

Pisciotta grabbed him by his full bushy hair and dragged him out of the shop and into the cobblestoned street where Silvestro was waiting. Frisella fell on his knees and began to scream.

"Turi, Turi, I cut your hair when you were a child. Don't you remember. My wife will starve. My son is weak in the head."

Pisciotta could see Guiliano wavering. He kicked the barber and said, "You should have thought of those things when you informed."

Frisella began to weep. "I never informed on Turi. I told the Maresciallo about some sheep stealers. I swear on my wife and child."

Guiliano looked down at the man. At that moment he felt that his heart would break, that what he was about to do would destroy him forever. But he said gently, "You have a minute to make your peace with God."

Frisella looked up at the three men surrounding him and saw no mercy. He bowed his head and murmured a prayer. Then looked up and said to Guiliano, "Don't let my wife and child starve."

"I promise you they will have bread," Guiliano said. He turned to Silvestro. "Kill him," he said.

The Corporal had watched the scene in a daze. But at these words he triggered his machine pistol. The bullets lifted Frisella's body and sent it skittering across the wet cobblestones. Blood darkened the little pools of water between the cracks. Blood ran black over the cracks the water had not reached and flushed out little lizards. There was a long moment of hushed silence in the square. Then Pisciotta knelt over the body and pinned a white square of paper on the dead man's chest.

When the Maresciallo arrived that was all he found as evidence. The shopkeepers had seen nothing, they claimed. They had been working in the rear of the store. Or they had been studying the beautiful clouds over Monte d'Ora. Frisella's customer said that he was washing his face in the basin when he heard the shots, he had never seen the murderers. But despite all this it was clear who was guilty. The square paper on Frisella's body read, so die all who betray guiliano.

CHAPTER 12

The war was now over but Guiliano's had just begun. In the course of two years, Salvatore Guiliano had become the most famous man in Sicily. He built up his domination of the northwest corner of the island. At the heart of his empire was the town of Montelepre. He controlled the towns of Piani dei Greci, Borgetto and Partinico. And the murderous town of Corleone, whose inhabitants were so ferocious they were notorious even in Sicily. He ranged just short of Trapani, and he threatened the town of Monreale and the capital of Sicily itself, Palermo. When the new democratic government in Rome put a price of ten million lire on his head, Guiliano laughed and continued to move confidently through many of the towns. He even dined occasionally in the restaurants of Palermo. At the end of the meal he would always leave a note under the plate which read, "This is to show that Turi Guiliano can go wherever he likes."

Guiliano's impregnable fortress was the vast galleries of the Cammarata Mountains. He knew all the caves and all the secret paths. He felt invincible here. He loved the view of Montelepre below him, the Partinico plain that stretched away to Trapani and the Mediterranean Sea. As twilight became blue, reflecting the faraway sea, he could see the ruined Greek temples, the orange groves, the olive orchards and the grain-filled fields that were Western Sicily. With his binoculars he could see the padlocked roadside shrines holding their dusty saints inside.

From these mountains he sallied forth with his men onto the white dusty roads to rob government convoys, stick up railway trains, and relieve rich women of their jewels. The peasants riding on their painted carts in holy festivals saluted him and his men at first with fear and then with respect and affection. There was not one of them, not a shepherd or laborer who had not benefited from his distribution of loot.

The whole countryside became his spies. At night when children said their prayers they included a plea to the Virgin Mary "to save Guiliano from the carabinieri. "

It was a countryside that fed Guiliano and his men. There were the olive and orange groves, the vineyards of grapes. There were the flocks of sheep whose shepherds looked the other way when the bandits came for a few lambs. Through this landscape Guiliano moved like a ghost, lost in the hazy blue light of Sicily which is the cerulean Mediterranean Sea reflected from the sky.

The winter months were long in the mountains, cold. And yet Guiliano's band grew. At night scores of campfires freckled the slopes and valleys of the Cammarata range. The men used the firelight to clean their guns, repair their clothing, do their laundry in the nearby mountain stream. Preparing the communal evening meal sometimes caused arguments. Every village in Sicily had a different recipe for squid and eels, disagreed on what herbs should be disbarred from the tomato sauce. And whether sausages should ever be baked. Men partial to the knife for murder liked to do laundry; the kidnappers preferred the cooking and sewing chores. The raiders of banks and trains stuck to cleaning their guns.

Guiliano made them all dig defense trenches and establish far-flung listening posts so they could not be surprised by government forces. One day when the men were digging they came upon the skeleton of a giant animal, bigger than they could imagine. Hector Adonis arrived that day bringing books for Guiliano to study, for Guiliano was curious now to know everything in the world. He studied books of science, of medicine, of politics, philosophy and military techniques. Hector Adonis brought him sackfuls every few weeks. Guiliano took him to where the men had dug up the skeleton. Adonis smiled at their puzzlement. "Haven't I given you enough books on history?" he said to Guiliano. "A man who does not know the history of mankind for the last two thousand years is a man living in the dark." He paused for a few moments. The mellow voice of Adonis was the lecturing voice of a professor.

"This is a skeleton of a war machine employed by Hannibal of Carthage who two thousand years ago traveled over these mountains to destroy imperial Rome. It is the skeleton of one of his war elephants, trained to combat and never before then seen on this continent. How frightening they must have been to those Roman soldiers. Yet they availed Hannibal nothing; Rome vanquished him and destroyed Carthage. These mountains have so many ghosts, and you have found one of them. Think, Turi, one day you will be one of the ghosts."

And Guiliano did think all that night. The idea pleased him that he would someday be one of the ghosts of history. If he were killed he hoped it would be in the mountains; he had the fantasy that, wounded, he would crawl into one of the thousands of caves and never be found until some accident discovered him, as had happened with Hannibal's elephant.

They changed encampments many times during the winter. And for weeks at a time the band dispersed altogether and slept in the houses of relatives, friendly shepherds, or the great empty granaries that belonged to the nobility. Guiliano spent most of the winter studying his books and making his plans. He had long talks with Hector Adonis.

In early spring he went with Pisciotta down the road that led to Trapani. On that road they saw a cart with new painted legends on its sides. For the first time they saw a panel showing the legend of Guiliano. It was a scene painted in gaudy reds, Guiliano taking the emerald ring from the finger of the Duchess as he bowed before her. In the background was Pisciotta holding a machine gun and threatening a group of cowering armed men. It was on that day too that they first wore the belt buckles with an eagle and a lion rampant etched on a rectangular block of gold. The buckles had been made by Silvestro, who now served as their armorer. He had given them to Guiliano and Pisciotta. It became an emblem of their leadership of the band. Guiliano always wore it; Pisciotta only when he was with Guiliano. For Pisciotta often went into the towns and villages disguised, even into the city of Palermo.

At night in the mountains Guiliano, when he took off the belt, studied the rectangular buckle of gold. On the left side, there was an eagle that looked like a man in feathers. On the right side was a lion rampant, its paws – like the eagle's winged arms – supporting a filigree circle between them. It looked as if together they were spinning a wheel of the world. The lion especially fascinated him with its human body below the leonine head. The king of the air, the king of the ground, etched into soft yellow, gold. Guiliano thought of himself as the eagle, Pisciotta the lion, and that circle, Sicily.

For centuries, kidnapping of the rich had been one of the cottage industries of Sicily. Usually the kidnappers were the most fearsome of the Mafiosi, who had merely to send a letter before the kidnapping. This would be in the polite form, to the effect that to avoid troublesome details the ransom be paid in advance. Like a wholesaler's discount for immediate cash payment, the ransom would be considerably less because all the irritating details, such as the actual kidnapping, did not have to be performed. For in all truth, such a thing as kidnapping a famous personage was not as easy as people thought it was. It was not a business for greedy amateurs or scatterbrained lazy good-for-nothings who refused to work for a living. Nor was it ever the harebrained, suicidal event that it was in America, where its practitioners had given kidnapping a bad name. Even the word "kidnapping" was not used in Sicily, since children were not held for ransom unless they were accompanied by an adult. For say what you would of a Sicilian: that they were born criminals, that they murdered as easily as a woman picks flowers, that they were as cunningly treacherous as Turks, that they were socially three hundred years behind the times; yet no one could dispute that Sicilians loved, no, they idolized children. So there was no such thing called kidnapping in Sicily. They would "invite" a rich person to be their guest, and he could not be released until he had paid room and board, as in a fine hotel.

This cottage industry had developed certain rules over hundreds of years. The price was always negotiable through intermediaries such as the Mafia. There was never any violence offered to the "guest," if he cooperated. The "guest" was treated with the utmost respect, always addressed by his rank, such as Prince or Duke or Don or even Archbishop, if some bandit chose to endanger his soul by seizing a member of the cloth. Even a Member of Parliament was called Honorable to his face though everyone knew these rascals were greater thieves than anyone.

This was done out of prudence. History showed it was a policy that paid off. Once the prisoner was released he did not show any desire for vengeance as long as his dignity had been preserved. There was the classic case of a great Duke, who, after being released, and then leading the carabinieri to where he knew the bandits were hiding, had then paid for their defense lawyers. When despite this they were convicted, the Duke interceded to cut their long prison term in half. This was because they had treated him with such exquisite tact and politeness that the Duke declared he had never encountered such fine manners even in the highest society of Palermo.

Conversely a prisoner who had been ill-treated would, upon his release, spend a fortune having his captors hunted down, sometimes offering a reward larger than the ransom paid.

But in the ordinary course of things, if both parties behaved in a civilized manner, the price was haggled over and the prisoner released. The rich of Sicily had come to think of this as a sort of unofficial tax for their living in the land they loved, and since they paid so little taxes to the official government, they bore this cross with Christian resignation.

Stubborn refusal or extended haggling was remedied by mild coercion. Then perhaps an ear was cut off, a finger amputated. Usually these were sufficient to bring everybody to his senses. Except for those extremely sad, rare cases when the body had to be delivered, ritually mutilated and riddled with bullets, or, in the olden days, stabbed numerous times in the pattern of the cross.

But "Inviting a Guest" was always a painstaking endeavor. The victim had to be observed for a period of time so that he could be snatched with minimum violence. Even before that, five or six hiding places had to be prepared and stocked with supplies and guards, for it was understood that the negotiations would be drawn out and the authorities would search for the victims. It was a complicated business not for amateurs.

When Guiliano decided to enter the kidnapping business, he was determined to entertain only the richest clients in Sicily. In fact his first victim was the island's wealthiest and most powerful noble. This was Prince Ollorto, who not only had vast estates in Sicily but also a virtual empire in Brazil. He was the landlord for most of the citizens of Montelepre – their farms and their houses. Politically he was the most powerful man behind the scenes; the Minister of Justice in Rome was a close personal friend, and the former King of Italy himself had stood godfather to the Prince's child. In Sicily the overseer for all his estates was Don Croce himself. It went without saying that the magnificent salary Don Croce was paid also included insurance payments to preserve Prince Ollorto's person from kidnappers and murderers and his jewels and cattle and sheep from thieves.

Safe in his castle, the walls guarded by Don Croce's retainers, the gatesmen, and his own personal guards, Prince Ollorto prepared for a peaceful and enjoyable evening of watching the stars in the heavens through the huge telescope which he loved more dearly than anything on earth. Suddenly there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the winding stairs that led to his observatory tower. The door crashed in and four roughly clad men holding guns filled the tiny room. The Prince covered his telescope protectively with his arm and turned away from the innocent stars to face them. When the Prince saw Terranova's ferretlike face, he offered up his prayers to God.

But Terranova said to him courteously, "Your Lordship, I am ordered to bring you to the mountains for a holiday with Turi Guiliano. You will be charged room and board for your visit, that is our custom. But you will be looked after like a newborn babe."

The Prince tried to hide his fear. He bowed and asked gravely, "May I take some medicines and a few clothes?"

Terranova said, "We will send for them. Speed now is of the essence. The carabinieri will arrive shortly and they are not invited to our little party. Now please go before me down the steps. And don't try to make a run for it. Our men are everywhere and even a Prince can't outrun bullets."

At the side gate far down the wall an Alfa Romeo and a jeep were waiting. Prince Ollorto was thrust into the Alfa Romeo with Terranova, the others jumped into the jeep, and the two vehicles sped up the mountain road. When they were a half-hour from Palermo and a short distance from Montelepre, the cars stopped and all the men got out. There was a roadside shrine with the figure of the Madonna, and Terranova knelt briefly before it and crossed himself. The Prince, who was a religious man, suppressed the impulse to do likewise, fearing it would be taken as a sign of weakness or of supplication to these men not to harm him. The five men spread out into a wide star formation, the Prince in its center. Then they started walking down a steep slope until they came upon a narrow path that led into the vast wilderness of the Cammarata Mountains.

They walked for hours, and often the Prince had to ask for a rest, which the men accompanying him granted courteously. They sat beneath a huge granite rock and ate supper. There was bread, a coarse loaf, a huge hunk of cheese and a bottle of wine. Terranova shared this equally among the men, including the Prince, and even with an apology. "I'm sorry to offer you nothing better," he said. "When we get to our camp Guiliano will give you a hot meal, perhaps some good rabbit stew. We have a cook who worked for restaurants in Palermo."

The Prince thanked him courteously and ate with good appetite. Indeed with better appetite than for the grand dinners he was used to. The exercise had made him ravenous, he had not felt such hunger for many years. Taking a packet of English cigarettes from his pocket, he offered them around. Terranova and each of his men took one gratefully and smoked avidly. The Prince mentally noted the fact that they did not appropriate the packet for their own use. So he was emboldened to say, "I have to take certain medicines. I am diabetic and must have insulin every day."

He was surprised at Terranova's concern. "But why didn't you say so?" he asked. "We could have waited a minute. But in any case don't worry. Guiliano will send for it and you will have it in the morning. I give you my promise."

"Thank you," the Prince said. Terranova's thin, whippetlike body seemed always to crouch with courteous and intense attention. His ferret face was always smiling and receptive. But he was like a razor: of use for service but also able to turn into something deadly. And then they resumed their march, Terranova at the point of the star formation. Often Terranova would drop back to chat with the Prince and reassure him he would come to no harm.

They had been ascending and finally they reached the flat top plain of a mountain. Three fires were going and picnic tables with bamboo chairs rested near the cliff edge. At one table Guiliano was reading a book by the light of an American Army battery lamp. There was a canvas bag filled with other books resting at his feet. The bag was covered with geckos and indeed there was a loud steady hum that filled the mountain air which the Prince recognized as the sound of millions of insects. It did not seem to bother Guiliano.

Guiliano rose from the table and greeted the Prince with courtesy. There was no air about him of captor to prisoner. But there was a curious smile on his face, for Guiliano was thinking how far he had come. Two years before he had been a poor peasant; now he held at his mercy the man with the bluest blood and richest purse in all of Sicily.

"Have you eaten?" Guiliano asked. "Is there anything you need to make your visit with us more pleasant? You will be with us for some time."

The Prince admitted to hunger and explained his need for insulin and other medicines. Guiliano called down over the side of the cliff and soon one of his men came rushing up the path with a pot of hot stew. Guiliano had the Prince write in great detail exactly what medicines he needed. "We have a chemist friend in Monreale who will open his shop for us no matter what the hour," Guiliano said. "You will have your medicine by noon tomorrow."

When the Prince had finished eating Guiliano led him down a slope and into a small cave where there was a straw bed with a mattress on it. Two of the bandits following them had blankets, and the Prince was amazed to see they even had white sheets and a huge lumpy pillow. Guiliano noticed his amazement and said, "You are an honored guest and I will do everything so that you may enjoy your little vacation. If any of my men offer you any disrespect, please inform me. They have received strict instructions to treat you with all regard for your rank, and your reputation as a patriot of Sicily. Now sleep well, you will need all your strength, for we make a long march tomorrow. A ransom note has been delivered and the carabinieri will be out in force searching so we must be a long way from here."

The Prince thanked him for his courtesy and then asked what the ransom would be.

Guiliano laughed and the Prince was charmed by that youthful laugh, the boyish handsomeness of his face. But with Guiliano's answer the charm vanished. "Your government has set a price of ten million lire on my head. It would be an insult to Your Lordship if the ransom were not ten times as high."

The Prince was stunned then said ironically, "I hope my family thinks as highly of me as you do."

"It will be open to negotiation," Guiliano said. When he left the two bandits prepared the bed and then sat outside the cave. Despite the absolute roar of the insects, Prince Ollorto slept better than he had in years.

Guiliano had been busy throughout the night. He had sent men to Montelepre for the medicine; he had lied to the Prince when he said Monreale. Then he had sent Terranova to the Abbot Manfredi at his monastery. He wanted the Abbot to handle the ransom negotiations, though he knew that the Abbot would have to work through Don Croce. But the Abbot would be a perfect buffer, and Don Croce would get his commission.

The negotiations would be long, and it was understood that the full sum of one hundred million lire could not be paid. Prince Ollorto was very rich, but, historically, the first demand was not the real price.

The second day of Prince Ollorto's kidnapping was a very pleasant one for him. There was a long but not arduous march to a deserted farmhouse deep in the mountains. Guiliano was very much the lord of the comfortable manor, as if he were a wealthy countryman honored by a surprise visit from his king. With his sharp eye Guiliano saw that Prince Ollorto was distressed by the condition of his clothes. That he looked regretfully at the carefully tailored English suit he had paid so much for being frayed by wear.

Guiliano asked him without contempt but only with real curiosity, "Do you really care so much for what you wear on the outside of your skin?"

The Prince had always had a pedagogical turn of mind. And certainly in these circumstances they both had time on their hands. So he gave Guiliano a speech on how correct clothing, beautifully tailored and of the finest materials, could enrich a man such as himself. He described the tailors in London, so snobbish that they made Italian Dukes seem like Communists in comparison. He told of all the different kinds of fabrics, the great skills, the time spent in getting innumerable fittings. "My dear Guiliano," Prince Ollorto said, "it's not the money, though Saint Rosalia knows that what I paid for this suit would keep a Sicilian family for a year, and pay for their daughter's dowry too. But I have to go to London. I have to spend days with tailors who push me back and forth. It is a miserable experience. So I regret that this suit is ruined. It can never be replaced."

Guiliano was studying the Prince with sympathy and he asked, "Why is it so important to you and your class that you must dress so extravagantly, or forgive me, so correctly? Even now you still wear your tie though we are in the mountains. When we entered this house I noticed you buttoned your jacket as if some Duchess were waiting to greet you."

Now Prince Ollorto, though he was an extreme reactionary politically, and like most of the Sicilian nobility had no sense of economic justice, had always a sense of identity with the lower classes. He felt that they were human beings like himself and no man who worked for him and minded his manners and knew his place would be left in want. The servants in his castle adored him. He treated them like members of the family. There were always gifts for their birthdays and little treats for them on the holidays. During family meals when no outside guests were present, the servants waiting on the table would join in the family discussion and give their opinions on the noble family's problems. And this was not uncommon in Italy. The lower classes were treated cruelly only when they fought for their economic rights.

And now the Prince took the same attitude toward Guiliano. As if his captor were only his servant who wanted to share his life, the enviable life of a very rich and powerful man. The Prince was suddenly aware that he could turn his period of captivity into an advantage that might even make paying his ransom worthwhile. But he knew he had to be very careful. That he had to exert his charm to the utmost without any condescension. That he had to be frank and sincere and as truthful as he could be. And that he could not try to make too much capital of the situation. For Guiliano could spring from weakness to strength.

So now he answered Guiliano's question seriously and with great genuineness. He said with a smile, "Why do you wear that emerald ring, that gold buckle?" He waited for an answer, but Guiliano only smiled. The Prince went on. "I married an even richer woman than myself. I have power and political duties. I have estates here in Sicily and an even larger estate in Brazil through my wife. People in Sicily kiss my hands as soon as I take them out of my pockets, and even in Rome I am held in great esteem. For in that city, money commands. Everyone's eyes are upon me. I feel ridiculous – I have done nothing to earn all this. But it is mine to keep and I must keep it, I cannot disgrace that public person. Even when I go out hunting in what seems to be a rough garb of the countryman, I must look the part perfectly. That of a rich and great man going hunting. How I envy men like you and Don Croce sometimes, who hold your power in your head and your heart. Who have won your power by your courage and your cunning. Isn't it laughable that I do almost the same thing by going to the best tailor in London?"

He delivered this speech so prettily that Guiliano laughed aloud. In fact Guiliano was so amused that the two of them ate dinner together and talked long of the miseries of Sicily and the poltrooneries of Rome.

The Prince knew of Don Croce's hope to enlist Guiliano and tried to further that aim. "My dear Guiliano," he said, "how is it that you and Don Croce do not join together to rule Sicily? He has the wisdom of age, you have the idealism of youth. There is no question that both of you love Sicily. Why can you not join forces in the times ahead which are dangerous for all of us? Now that the war is over, things are changing. The Communists and Socialists hope to degrade the Church, destroy blood ties. They dare to say that duty to a political party is more important than the love for your mother, the devotion you owe your brothers and sisters. What if they were to win the elections and set these policies in motion?"

"They can never win," Guiliano said. "Sicilians will never vote Communist."

"Don't be so sure," the Prince said. "You remember Silvio Ferra, he was your boyhood friend. Good boys like Silvio went to the war and came back infected with radical notions. Their agitators promise free bread, free land. The innocent peasant is like a donkey following a carrot. They may very well vote Socialist."

"I have no love for the Christian Democrats, but I would do everything to prevent a Socialist government," Guiliano said.

"Only you and Don Croce can ensure the freedom of Sicily," the Prince said. "You must join together. Don Croce speaks always as if you were his son – he has a positive affection for you. And only he can avert a great war between you and the Friends of the Friends. He understands that you do what you must do; I understand it too. But even now the three of us can work together and preserve our destinies. If not we can all go down to destruction."

Turi Guiliano could not contain his anger. What insolence the rich had. He said with lethal calm, "Your own ransom has not yet been settled and yet you propose an alliance. You may be dead."

The Prince slept badly that night. But Guiliano showed no further ill will, and the Prince spent his next two weeks in a very profitable fashion. His health improved and his body toned up with the daily exercise and fresh air. Though he had always been slim, he had acquired deposits of fat around his middle and these now disappeared. Physically he had never felt better.

And mentally too he was exhilarated. Sometimes when he was moved from place to place, Guiliano was not with the party guarding him, and he had to make conversation with men who were illiterate and ignorant of any culture. But he was surprised at their character. Most of these bandits were naturally courteous, had a native dignity, and were by no means unintelligent. They always addressed him by his rank and tried to grant his every request. He had never come so close to his fellow Sicilians before, and he was surprised to feel a renewed affection for his land and his people. The ransom, finally settled at sixty million lire in gold, was paid through Don Croce and the Abbot Manfredi. The night before his release, Prince Ollorto was given a banquet by Guiliano and his chiefs and twenty of the most important members of the band. Champagne was brought from Palermo to celebrate the occasion and they all toasted his imminent freedom, for they had grown fond of him. The Prince gave the final toast. "I have been a guest at the most noble family houses in Sicily," he said. "But I have never received such good treatment, such hospitality, or men with such exquisite manners as I have here in these mountains. I have never slept so soundly or eaten so well." He paused for a moment and said with a smile, "The bill was a little high, but good things always come dear.'' This brought a roar of laughter, Guiliano laughing loudest of all. But the Prince noticed that Pisciotta did not even smile.

They all drank to his health and gave him a cheer. It was a night the Prince would remember for the rest of his life, and with pleasure.

The next morning, a Sunday, the Prince was deposited in front of the Cathedral of Palermo. He went into the church for early Mass and said a prayer of Thanksgiving. He was dressed exactly as on the day he was kidnapped. Guiliano, as a surprise and a token of his esteem, had had his English suit repaired and cleaned by the finest tailor in Rome.

CHAPTER 13

The Mafia chiefs of Sicily demanded a meeting with Don Croce. Though Don Croce was acknowledged as the chief among the chiefs, he did not rule them directly. They had their own empires. The Mafia was like one of those medieval kingdoms where powerful barons banded together to support the wars of their most powerful member, whom they acknowledged as their nominal ruler. But like those ancient barons they had to be wooed by their king, they had to be rewarded with the spoils of war. Don Croce ruled them not by force but by the power of his intelligence, his charisma, his lifelong acquisition of "respect." He ruled by combining their divergent interests into one general interest, by which they all benefited.

Don Croce had to be careful with them. They all had their private armies, their secret assassins, stranglers, poisoners, honorable wielders of straightforward death by the dreaded lupara. In that area their strength was equal to his; that was why the Don had wanted to enlist Turi Guiliano as his own personal warrior chief. These men were clever, too, in their own right, some of them the most cunning men living in Sicily. They did not begrudge the Don the building of his power; they trusted and believed in him. But even the most intelligent man in the world can be wrong sometimes. And they believed that the Don's infatuation with Guiliano was the only failure that had emerged from the labyrinth of his mind.

Don Croce arranged a sumptuous lunch for the six chiefs in the garden of the Hotel Umberto in Palermo where secrecy and security were assured.

The most fearful of these chiefs and the most outspoken was Don Siano, who ruled the town of Bisacquino. He had agreed to speak for the others and he did so with the harsh courtesy that was the rule of the Friends of the Friends at their highest level.

"My dear Don Croce," Don Siano said, "you know the respect we all have for you. It was you who resurrected us and our families. We owe you a great deal. So it is only to do you a service that we speak out now. This bandit Turi Guiliano has become too strong. We have treated him with too much deference. He is a mere boy and yet he defies your authority and ours. He robs the jewels from our most illustrious clients. He abducts the olives, the grapes, the corn of our richest landowners. And now he shows us a final disrespect we cannot ignore. He kidnaps Prince Ollorto whom he knows to be under our protection. And yet you continue to treat with him, you continue to extend your hand in friendship. I know he is strong, but are we not stronger? And if we let him go his way, will he not grow stronger still? We all of us agree that now is the time to resolve this question. We must take all the measures possible to negate his strength. If we ignore his kidnapping of Prince Ollorto we will be the laughingstock of all Sicily."

Don Croce nodded his head as if in agreement with all that had been said. But he did not speak. Guido Quintana, the least of the men present, said almost plaintively, "I am the Mayor of Montelepre and everybody knows I am one of the Friends. But nobody comes to me for judgment or redress or gifts. Guiliano rules the town and permits me to live there on his sufferance so as not to provoke a quarrel with you gentlemen. But I cannot make a living, I have no authority. I am a mere figurehead. While Guiliano lives, the Friends do not exist in Montelepre. I am not afraid of this lad. I faced him down once. Before he became a bandit. I do not think him a man to be feared. If this council agrees I will attempt to eliminate him. I have made plans and I only await your approval to execute them."

Don Piddu of Caltanissetta and Don Arzana of Piani dei Greci nodded. Don Piddu said, "Where would be the difficulty? With our resources we can deliver his corpse to the Cathedral of Palermo and go to his funeral as we would to a wedding."

The other chiefs, Don Marcuzzi of Villamura, Don Buccilla of Partinico, and Don Arzana voiced their approval. Then they waited.

Don Croce lifted his massive head. His spike of a nose impaled them each in turn as he spoke. "My dear friends, I agree with everything you feel," he said. "But I think you underrate this young man. He is cunning beyond his years and perhaps as brave as any of us here. He will not be so easy to kill. Also I see a use for him in the future, not just for myself but for all of us. The Communist agitators are whipping the people of Sicily into a madness that makes them expect another Garibaldi, and we must make sure that Guiliano is not flattered into being their savior. I do not have to tell you the consequences to us if those savages ever come to rule Sicily. We must persuade him to fight on our side. Our position is not yet so secure that we can afford to throw away his strength by assassinating him." The Don sighed, washed down a morsel of bread with a glass of wine and mopped his mouth daintily with his napkin. "Do me this one favor. Let me make a last effort to persuade him. If he refuses, then do what you feel you must do. I will give you your answer within three days' time. Just let me make one last effort to come to a reasonable agreement."

It was Don Siano who first bowed his head in agreement. After all, what reasonable man would be so impatient to commit murder that he could not wait three days? When they left, Don Croce summoned Hector Adonis to his home in Villaba.

The Don was peremptory with Adonis. "I have come to the end of my patience with your godson," he said to the little man.

"He must now be with us or against us. The kidnapping of Prince Ollorto was a direct insult to my person, but I am willing to forgive and forget. After all he is young, and I remember when I was his age I had his high spirits. As I have said always, I admire him for it. And believe me, I value his abilities. I would be overjoyed if he agreed to be my right hand. But he must recognize his place in the scheme of things. I have other chiefs who are not so admiring, not so understanding. I will not be able to hold them back. So go to your godson and tell him what I have told you. And bring me back his answer tomorrow at the latest. I can wait no longer."

Hector Adonis was frightened. "Don Croce, I recognize your generosity in spirit and deed. But Turi is willful and like all young men too sure of his power. And it is true he is not altogether helpless. If he wars on the Friends, I know he cannot win, but the damage could be frightful. Is there some reward I can promise him?"

The Don said, "Promise him this. He will have a high place in the Friends, and he will have my personal loyalty and my love. And after all he cannot live in the mountains forever. There will come a time when he will wish to take his place in society, to live within the law in the bosom of his family. When that day comes, I am the only man in Sicily who can assure him his pardon. And it will be my greatest happiness to do so. I mean this sincerely." And indeed when the Don spoke in this fashion he could not be disbelieved, he could not be resisted.

When Hector Adonis went up into the mountains to meet with Guiliano he was very troubled and frightened for his godson and he resolved to speak frankly. He wanted Guiliano to understand that their love for each other came first, even above his allegiance to Don Croce. When he arrived, chairs and folding tables were set up at the edge of the cliff. Turi and Aspanu sat alone. He said to Guiliano, "I must talk to you privately."

Pisciotta said angrily, "Little man, Turi has no secrets from me."

Adonis ignored the insult. He said calmly, "Turi can tell you what I will tell him, if he likes. That is his affair. But I cannot tell you. I cannot take that responsibility."

Guiliano patted Pisciotta's shoulder. "Aspanu, leave us alone. If it's something you should know, I'll tell you." Pisciotta rose abruptly, gave Adonis a hard stare and walked away.

Hector Adonis waited for a long time. Then he began to speak. "Turi, you are my godson. I have loved you since you were an infant. I taught you, gave you books to read, helped you when you became an outlaw. You are one of the few people in the world who makes living worthwhile for me. And yet your cousin Aspanu insults me without a word of reproach from you."

Guiliano said sadly, "I trust you more than I trust anyone except for my mother and father."

"And Aspanu," Hector Adonis said reproachfully. "Has he not grown too bloodthirsty for any man to trust?"

Guiliano looked him in the eyes and Adonis had to admire the serene honesty of his face. "Yes, I must confess, I trust Aspanu more than I do you. But I have loved you since I was a little boy. You freed my mind with your books and wit. I know you've helped my mother and father with your money. And you have been a true friend in my troubles. But I see you entangled with the Friends of the Friends, and something tells me that is what brings you here today."

Once again, Adonis marveled at his godson's instincts. He presented the case to Turi. "You must come to an accommodation with Don Croce," he said. "Not the King of France, not the King of the Two Sicilies, not Garibaldi, not even Mussolini himself could ever completely crush the Friends of the Friends. You cannot hope to win a war against them. I beg of you to come to an accommodation. You must bend your knee to Don Croce at the beginning, but who knows what your position will be in the future. I tell you this on my honor and on the head of your mother whom we both adore: Don Croce believes in your genius and bears the seed of a true love for your person. You will be his heir, the favored son. But for this time you must bow to his rule."

He could see that Turi was moved by this and took him very seriously. Hector Adonis said passionately, "Turi, think of your mother. You cannot live in the mountains forever, risking your life to see her a few days every year. With Don Croce you can hope for a pardon."

The young man took some time to collect his thoughts and then spoke to his godfather in a slow serious tone. "First of all I wish to thank you for your honesty," he said. "The offer is very tempting. But I am now committed to free the poor in Sicily, and I do not believe the Friends have that same aim. They are servitors of the rich and the politicians in Rome and these are my sworn enemies. Let us wait and see. Certainly I kidnapped Prince Ollorto and stepped on their toes but I continue to permit Quintana to live and he is a man I despise. I forbear out of respect for Don Croce. Tell him that. Tell him that and tell him that I pray for the day when we can become equal partners. When our interests will not conflict. As for his chiefs, let them do what they will. I have no fear of them."

It was with a heavy heart that Hector Adonis brought this answer back to Don Croce, who nodded his leonine head as if he had expected nothing else.

In the following month three separate attempts were made on Guiliano's life. Guido Quintana was allowed the first pass. He planned with an elaborateness that was worthy of the Borgias. There was a road that Guiliano frequently used when he made a sortie out of the mountains. Alongside the road were lush fields which Quintana filled with a great flock of sheep. Guarding these sheep were three harmless-looking shepherds, natives of the town of Corleone and old friends of Quintana.

For almost a week, when Guiliano was sighted coming down the road, the shepherds would greet him respectfully and in the old tradition ask for his hand to kiss. Guiliano engaged them in friendly conversation; shepherds were often part-time members of his band and he was always looking for new recruits. He did not feel himself in any danger since he nearly always traveled with bodyguards and often with Pisciotta, who was worth at least two men. The shepherds were unarmed and wore light clothing that could not conceal weapons.

But the shepherds had lupare and ammunition belts strapped to the bellies of some sheep in the middle of the flock. They waited for an opportunity when Guiliano would be alone or not so heavily guarded. But Pisciotta had wondered about the friendliness of these shepherds, the sudden appearance of this flock of sheep, and he made inquiries through his network of informants. The shepherds were identified as assassins employed by Quintana.

Pisciotta wasted no time. He took ten members of his own private band and rounded up the three shepherds. He questioned them closely about who owned the sheep, how long they had been shepherds, where they had been born, the names of their mothers and fathers, their wives and children. The shepherds answered with seeming frankness, but Pisciotta had the proof they were lying.

A search uncovered the weapons hidden in the fleece of the animals. Pisciotta would have executed the imposters, but Guiliano vetoed this. After all, no harm had been done and the real villain was Quintana.

So the shepherds were made to drive the flock of sheep into the town of Montelepre. And there in the main square they were made to sing out, "Come claim your gift from Turi Guiliano. A lamb for every household, a blessing from Turi Guiliano." And then the shepherds would do the slaughtering and skinning for any who requested such services.

"Remember," Pisciotta told the shepherds. "I want you to be as obliging as the sweetest shopgirl in Palermo, as if you were getting a commission. And give my regards and thanks to Guido Quintana."

Don Siano was not so elaborate. He sent two men as emissaries to bribe Passatempo and Terranova to act against Guiliano. But Don Siano could not comprehend the loyalty Guiliano inspired even in such a brute as Passatempo. Again Guiliano vetoed death, but Passatempo himself sent the two emissaries back with the mark of the bastinado.

The third attempt was made by Quintana again. And it was this attempt that made Guiliano lose his patience.

A new priest came to Montelepre, a traveling friar bearing various religious stigmata on his body. He said Mass at the local church one Sunday morning and showed his holy wounds.

His name was Father Dodana, and he was a tall athletic man who walked so briskly that his black cassock swirled in the air above his cracked leather shoes. His hair was a whitish blond, his face wrinkled and brown as a nut though he was still a young man. Within a month he was a legend in the town of Montelepre, for he was not afraid of hard work; he helped the local farmers gather their crops, he chastised mischievous children in the streets, he called on sick old women in their homes to confess their sins. And so one Sunday when he was standing outside the church after saying Mass, Maria Lombardo Guiliano was not surprised that he stopped her and asked if he could do something for her son.

"Surely you worry about his immortal soul," Father Dodana said. "The next time he comes to visit you send for me and I will hear his confession."

Maria Lombardo had no love for priests though she was religious. But this man impressed her. She knew Turi would never make a confession, but perhaps he would have use for a holy man sympathetic to his cause. She told the priest that her son would be informed of his offer. Father Dodana said, "I would even go into the mountains to help him. Tell him that. My only business is to save souls in danger of hell. What a man does is his own business."

Turi Guiliano came to visit his mother a week later. She urged him to see the priest and make a confession. Perhaps Father Dodana would give him Holy Communion. She would be easier in mind if he were shriven of his sins.

Turi Guiliano was very interested, which surprised his mother. He agreed to see the priest and he sent Aspanu Pisciotta to the church to escort him back to the Guiliano home. As Guiliano had suspected, when Father Dodana appeared, he moved too much like a man of action; he was too vigorous and he was too sympathetic to Guiliano's cause.

Father Dodana said, "My son, I will listen to your confession in the privacy of your bedroom. And then I will give you Communion. I have all my things here." He patted the wooden case under his arm. "Your soul will be as pure as your mother's, and if some evil befalls you, you will go straight to heaven."

Maria Lombardo said, "I'll make coffee and some food for you and the holy father." She went into the kitchen.

"You can confess me here," Turi Guiliano said with a smile.

Father Dodana glanced at Aspanu Pisciotta. "Your friend will have to leave the room," he said.

Turi laughed. "My sins are public. They appear in every newspaper. My soul is pure otherwise, except for one thing. I must confess to a suspicious nature. So I would like to see what is in that box you carry under your arm."

"The wafers of Holy Communion," Father Dodana said. "I will show you." He started to open the box but at that moment Pisciotta pressed a pistol against the back of his neck. Guiliano took the box away from the priest. At that moment they looked into each other's eyes. Guiliano opened the box. A dark blue automatic nestled in a bed of holy velvet glinted up at him.

Pisciotta saw Guiliano's face go pale, his eyes with their silver circles go black with a subdued fury.

Guiliano closed the box and looked up at the priest. "I think we should go to the church and pray together," he said. "We will say a prayer for you and we will say a prayer for Quintana. We will pray to the good Lord to take the evil out of Quintana's heart and the greediness out of yours. How much did he promise to pay you?"

Father Dodana was not worried. The other would-be assassins had been let off so lightly. He shrugged and then smiled. "The government reward and five million lire extra."

"A good price," Guiliano said. "I don't blame you for trying to make your fortune. But you deceived my mother and that I can't forgive. Are you a real priest?"

"Me?" Father Dodana said contemptuously. "Never. But I thought no one would suspect me."

The three of them walked down the street together, Guiliano carrying the wooden box, Pisciotta trailing behind. They entered the church. Guiliano made Father Dodana kneel at the altar, then took the automatic out of the wooden box. "You have a minute to say your prayers," Guiliano said.

The next morning Guido Quintana rose to go down to the cafe for his morning coffee. When he opened the door of his house, he was startled by a massive shadow blocking off the usual early morning sunlight. In the next instant a huge roughly made wooden cross tumbled inside, almost knocking him down. Nailed to that cross was the bullet-ridden body of Father Dodana.

Don Croce pondered these failures. Quintana had been warned. He must devote himself to his duties as Mayor or the city of Montelepre would be forced to govern itself. It was clear Guiliano had lost patience and might launch an all-out war against the Friends. Don Croce recognized the sureness of a master in Guiliano's retribution. Only one more strike could be made and it must not fail. Don Croce knew that he must, finally take a stand. And against his judgment and his true will, he sent for his most reliable assassin, a certain Stefano Andolini, also known as Fra Diavalo.

CHAPTER 14

The garrison of Montelepre had been increased to more than a hundred carabinieri, and on the rare times Guiliano crept into town to spend an evening with his family, he was in constant fear that the carabinieri would swoop down upon them.

One such evening, listening to his father talk of the old days in America, the idea had come to him. Salvatore Senior was drinking wine and swapping tales with an old and trusted friend who had been in America also and had returned to Sicily with him, and they good-naturedly reproached each other for being so stupid. The other man, a carpenter named Alfio Dorio, reminded Guiliano's father of their first few years in America before they had worked for the Godfather, Don Corleone. They had been hired to help build a huge tunnel under a river, either to New Jersey or to Long Island, they quarreled about that. They reminisced about how eerie it was to work beneath a flowing river, their dread that the tubes holding out the water would collapse and they would drown like rats. And suddenly it came to Guiliano. These two men with some trusted helpers could build a tunnel from his parents' house to the base of the mountains only a hundred yards away. The exit could be hidden by the huge granite rocks and the source of the tunnel in the house could be hidden in one of the closets or beneath the stove in the kitchen. If that could be done Guiliano might come and go as he pleased.

The two older men told him that it was impossible, but his mother was wild with pleasure at the idea that her son could secretly come and sleep in his bed on cold winter nights. Alfio Dorio said that given the necessity for secrecy, the limited amount of men who could be used, and since the work could only be done at night, it would take too long to complete such a tunnel. And then there were problems. How would they get rid of the dirt excavated without being observed? And the soil here was full of stones. What if they came up against a strain of granite underground? And then what if the tunnel were betrayed by some of the men recruited to work on it? But the persistent objection of the two older men was that it would take at least a year. And Guiliano realized that they harped on this because they believed in their heart of hearts that he would not be alive so long. His mother realized the same thing.

She said to the two older men: "My son asks you to do something that may help save his life. If you are too lazy to do so, then I will. We can try at least. What do we have to lose except our labor? And what can the authorities do even if they discover the tunnel? We have a perfect right to dig on our land. We'll say we're making a cellar for vegetables and wine. Just think. This tunnel may someday save Turi's life. Isn't that worth some sweat?"

Hector Adonis was also present. Adonis said he would get some books on excavation and the necessary equipment. He also came up with a variation that pleased them all: that they build a little offshoot tunnel that would lead into another house on the Via Bella, an escape hatch in case the exit of the tunnel was compromised or betrayed by an informer. This offshoot tunnel would be dug first, and only by the two old men and Maria Lombardo. Nobody else would know about it. And it would not take so long to dig.

They had a long discussion on which house was trustworthy. Guiliano's father suggested the home of Aspanu Pisciotta's parents, but this was immediately vetoed by Guiliano. The house was too suspect, would be closely watched. And there were too many relatives living in that house. Too many people would know. Besides, Aspanu was not on good terms with his family. His natural father had died, and when his mother remarried he had never forgiven her.

Hector Adonis volunteered his house but it was too far away, and Guiliano did not want to endanger his godfather. For if the tunnel was discovered the owner of the house would surely be arrested. Other relatives and friends were considered and rejected, and then finally Guiliano's mother said, "There is only one person. She lives alone, just four houses down the street. Her husband was killed by the carabinieri, she hates them. She is my best friend and she is fond of Turi, she has watched him grow from a boy to a man. Didn't she send him food all the winter he spent in the mountains? She is my true friend and I have complete trust in her."

She paused for a moment and then said, "La Venera." And of course since the discussion had begun, they had been waiting for her to say that name. From the first, La Venera had been the only logical choice in all their minds. But they were Sicilian males and could not make such a suggestion. If La Venera agreed and the story came out, her reputation would be ruined forever. She was a young widow. She would be granting her privacy and her person to a young male. Who could ever doubt that she would lose her virtue? No man in that part of Sicily could marry or even respect such a woman. It was true that La Venera was at least fifteen years older than Turi Guiliano. But she was not yet forty. And though her face was not beautiful, it was attractive enough, and there was a certain fire in her eyes. In any case she was female and he was male and with the tunnel they would be alone together. There could not therefore be any doubt that they would become lovers, for no Sicilian believed that any male and female alone together, no matter what difference in age, could refrain. And so the tunnel into her house that perhaps might one day save Turi Guiliano's life would also mark her as a woman of ill repute. What they all understood except for Turi Guiliano himself was that Guiliano's sexual chastity worried them. It was not natural in a Sicilian male. He was almost prudish. His band of men went to Palermo to visit whores; Aspanu Pisciotta had scandalous love affairs. His bandit chiefs Terranova and Passatempo were known to be the lovers of poor widows to whom they gave gifts. Passatempo even had a reputation as a man who used persuasion more typical of rapist than suitor, though he trod carefully now that he was under Guiliano's orders. Guiliano had decreed execution for any of his men who raped.

For all these reasons they had to wait for Guiliano's mother to put forth the name of her friend, and they were a little surprised when she did so. Maria Lombardo Guiliano was a religious, old-fashioned woman who did not hesitate to call the young girls of the town whores if they so much as took a stroll in the village square without a chaperone. They did not know what Maria Lombardo knew. That La Venera, because of the sufferings of childbirth, the lack of proper medical care, could no longer become pregnant. They could not know that Maria Lombardo had already decided that La Venera could best comfort her son in the safest possible way. Her son was an outlaw with a price on his head and could easily be betrayed by a woman. He was young and virile and needed a woman – who better than an older woman who could not bear children, and who could not make any claims for marriage? And indeed would not want to marry a bandit. She had had her fill of that misery. A husband shot down before her eyes. It was a perfect arrangement. Only La Venera's reputation would suffer, and so she would have to make the decision herself. It would be on her head if she agreed.

When Guiliano's mother made that request a few days later she was surprised when La Venera gave a proud and joyful yes. It confirmed a suspicion that her friend had a weakness for Turi. So be it, Maria Lombardo thought as she took La Venera into her arms with grateful tears. The offshoot tunnel was completed in four months; the main tunnel would not be completed for another year. Periodically Guiliano would sneak into town at night and visit his family and sleep in a warm bed, after his mother's hot meals; there would always be a feast. But it was nearly spring before he found it necessary to use the offshoot tunnel. A carabinieri patrol in strength came down the Via Bella and passed by. They were armed to the teeth. Guiliano's bodyguard of four men hidden in nearby houses was ready to do battle. But they passed on. Still there was the fear that on their return they might decide to raid the Guiliano home. So Turi Guiliano went through the trapdoor in his parents' bedroom and into the tunnel.

The offshoot was disguised by a wooden panel covered with a foot of dirt so that workers on the main tunnel would not know it existed. Guiliano had to dig away the dirt and remove the wooden disc. It took him another fifteen minutes to crawl through the narrow space that led under La Venera's house. The trapdoor there led to the kitchen and was covered by a huge iron stove. Guiliano tapped on the trapdoor with the prearranged signal and waited. He tapped again. He never feared bullets, but he feared this darkness. Finally there was a faint noise above him and then the trapdoor was raised. It could not rise all the way because the stove above it broke the plane of the lid. Guiliano had to squeeze through the opening and wound up on his belly on La Venera's kitchen floor.

Though it was the middle of the night, La Venera was still in her usual ill-fitting black dress, the mourning for her husband though he was three years dead. Her feet were bare. She wore no stockings, and as Guiliano rose from the floor he could see the skin on her legs was a startling white, so very much in contrast to the brown skin of her sunburned face and the jet black, coarse and heavily woven hair. For the first time he noticed that her face was not as broad as that of most of the older women in his town, that it was triangular, and though her eyes were dark brown, they had little black flecks in them he had never seen before. In her hand she held a scuttle full of live coals as if ready to throw them at the open trapdoor. Now she calmly slid the coals back into the stove and replaced the lid. She looked a little frightened.

Guiliano reassured her. "It's just a patrol roaming around. When they return to their barracks, I'll leave. But don't worry, I have friends out in the street."

They waited. La Venera made him coffee and they chatted. She noted that he did not have any of the nervous movements of her husband. He did not peer out the windows, his body did not tense at sudden noises in the street. He seemed completely relaxed. She did not know he had trained himself to act this way because of her stories about her husband and because he did not want to alarm his parents, especially his mother. He projected such an air of confidence that she soon forgot the danger he was in and they gossiped about the little happenings of the town.

She asked him if he had received the food she had sent him in the mountains from time to time. He thanked her and said how he and his companions had fallen on her food packets as if they were gifts from the Magi. How his men had complimented her cooking. He did not tell her of the coarse jokes some of his companions had made, that if her lovemaking equaled her cooking she would be a prize indeed. Meanwhile he was watching her closely. She was not being as friendly to him as usual; she did not show that fond tenderness she had always shown in public. He wondered if he had offended her in some way. When the danger was past and it was time for him to leave, they were formal with each other.

Two weeks later, Guiliano came to her again. The winter was near its end, but the mountains were filled with storm gales and the padlocked shrines of saints along the roads were dripping with rain. Guiliano in his cave dreamed of his mother's cooking, a hot bath, his soft bed in his childhood room. And mixed with these longings, much to his surprise, was the memory of the white skin of La Venera's legs. Night had fallen when he whistled up to his bodyguards and took the road down to Montelepre.

His family greeted him with joy. His mother started to cook his favorite dishes and as they were cooking she prepared a hot bath. His father had poured him a glass of anisette when one of the network of spies came to the house and told him that carabinieri patrols were surrounding the town and the Maresciallo himself was about to lead a flying squadron out of the Bellampo Barracks to raid the Guiliano household.

Guiliano went through the closet trapdoor and into the tunnel. It was muddy with rain and the earth clung to him and made the trip long and laborious. When he crawled into La Venera's kitchen his clothes were covered with slime, his face black.

When La Venera saw him, she laughed and it was the first time Guiliano could ever remember her laughing. "You look like a Moor," she said. And for a moment he felt a child's hurt, perhaps because the Moors were always the villains in the puppet shows of Sicily, and instead of being a hero in danger of his life, he could be seen as a villain. Or perhaps because her laugh made her seem inaccessible to his inner desire. She saw that in some way she had injured his vanity. "I'll fill the bath tin and you can get clean," she said. "And I have some of my husband's clothes you can wear while I clean yours."

She had expected him to object, that he would be too nervous to bathe in such a moment of danger. Her husband had been so jumpy when he visited her that he would never undress, never leave his guns out of reach of his hands. But Guiliano smiled at her and took off his heavy jacket and his guns and put them over the wooden box that held her firewood.

It took time to heat pots of water and fill the tin tub. She gave him coffee while they waited and studied him. He was handsome as an angel, she thought, but she was not deceived. Her husband had been as handsome and murdered men. And the bullets that killed him had made him ugly enough, she thought with misery; it was not clever to love a man's face, not in Sicily. How she had wept, but secretly there was the tremendous surge of relief. His death had been certain, once he had turned bandit, and every day she had waited, hoping he would die in the mountains or some far-off town. But he had been shot down before her eyes. And ever since she had been unable to escape the shame, not of his being a bandit, but of his dying an inglorious and not a brave death. He had surrendered and begged for mercy and the carabinieri had massacred him before her eyes. Thank God her daughter had not seen her father slain. A small mercy from Christ.

She saw that Turi Guiliano was watching her with that special light on his face that signaled desire in all men. She knew it well. Her husband's followers often had such a look. But she knew Turi would not try to seduce her, out of respect for his mother, out of respect for her sacrifice in allowing the tunnel to be built.

She left the kitchen and went into the small living room so that he could bathe in privacy. When she left, Guiliano stripped and stepped into the bath. The act of being naked with a woman nearby was erotic to him. He washed with scrupulous care and then put on her husband's clothes. The trousers were a little short and the shirt was tight around his chest so that he had to leave the top buttons undone. The towels she had warmed near the stove were little more than rags, his body still felt damp, and for the first time he realized how poor she was and resolved to supply her with money through his mother.

He called out to La Venera that he was dressed and she came back into the kitchen. She looked him over and said, "But you haven't washed your hair, you have a nest of geckos hiding there." She said this roughly but with a warm affection so that he did not take offense. Like some old grandmother she ran her hands over his matted hair, then took him by the arm and led him to the sink.

Guiliano felt a warm glow where her hand had touched his skull. He quickly put his head under the faucet and she ran water over him and shampooed his hair with the yellow kitchen soap; she had no other. When she did so her body and legs brushed against him and he felt the sudden urge to pass his hands over her breast, her soft belly.

When she finished washing his hair, La Venera made him sit on one of her black enameled kitchen chairs and vigorously dried his hair with a rough, raggedy brown towel. His hair was so long that it covered the collar of his shirt.

"You look like one of those ruffian English lords in the movies," she said. "I must cut your hair, but not in the kitchen. It will blow into my pots and spoil your dinner. Come into the other room."

Guiliano was amused by her sternness. She was assuming the role of an aunt or mother as if to prevent any show of a more tender feeling. He was aware of the sexuality behind it, but he was wary. In this area he was inexperienced and he did not want to look foolish. It was like the guerrilla warfare he waged in the mountains; he would not commit himself until all the odds were on his side. This was not scouted terrain. But the last year of commanding and killing men made his natural boyish fear seem more like a joke, the rejection by a woman not so paralyzing to his ego. And despite his reputation for chastity, he had gone to Palermo with his friends to visit prostitutes. But that was before he had become an outlaw and acquired the dignity of a bandit chief, and of course a romantic hero who would never do such a thing.

La Venera led him into the small living room cluttered with stuffed furniture, small tables topped with black varnished wood. On these tables were photographs of her dead husband and dead child, singly and together. Some were of La Venera with her family. The photos were framed in black oval wood, the prints tinged with sepia brown. Guiliano was surprised by the beauty of La Venera in these younger, happier days, especially when she was dressed in pretty, youthful clothes. There was a formal portrait of her alone, dressed in a dark red dress, that struck him to the heart. And for a moment he thought of her husband and how many crimes he must have committed to bring her such finery. "Don't look at those pictures," La Venera said with a sad smile. "That was in a time when I thought the world could make me happy." He realized that one of the reasons she had brought him into this room was to make him see these pictures.

She kicked the small stool from a corner of the room and Guiliano sat on it. From a leather box, beautifully made and stitched with gold, she took scissors, razor and comb – a prize the bandit Candeleria had brought home one Christmas from one of his crimes. Then she went into the bedroom and brought a white cloth which she hung over Guiliano's shoulders. She also brought a wooden bowl which she placed on the table beside her. A jeep went by the house.

She said, "Should I bring your guns from the kitchen? Would you be more comfortable?"

Guiliano looked at her calmly. He seemed absolutely serene. He did not want to alarm her. They both knew the jeep going by was full of carabinieri on their way to raid the Guiliano home. But he knew two things: If the carabinieri came here and tried to enter the barred door, Pisciotta and his men would massacre them all; and before he had left the kitchen he had moved the stove so that no one could raise the trapdoor.

He touched her gently on the arm. "No," he said. "I don't need my guns unless you plan to cut my throat with that razor." They both laughed.

And then she began to cut Turi Guiliano's hair. She did so carefully and slowly, grasping strands to snip, then depositing the hair into the wooden bowl. Guiliano sat very quietly. Mesmerized by the tiny snipping noises, he stared at the walls of the room. On them were huge portraits of La Venera's husband, the great bandit Candeleria. But great only in this little province of Sicily, Guiliano thought, his youthful pride already in competition with the dead husband.

Rutillo Candeleria had been a handsome man. He had a high forehead surmounted by wavy chestnut hair carefully cut, and Guiliano wondered if his wife had cut it for him. His face was adorned with full cavalry mustaches which made him seem older, though he had only been thirty-five when the carabinieri shot him. Now his face looked down from the oval portrait almost kindly, in a benediction. Only the eyes and mouth betrayed his ferocity. And yet at the same time there was a resignation in that face, as if he knew what his fate must be. Like all who raised their hands against the world and tore from it what they wished by violence and murder, like others who made personal law and tried to rule society with it. he must come finally to sudden death.

The wooden bowl was filling with glossy brown hair, clumped like the nests of small birds. Guiliano felt La Venera's legs pressed against his back; her heat came through the rough cotton of her dress. When she moved in front of him to cut around his forehead she kept well away from his leg, but when she had to lean forward, the swelling of her bust almost brushed against his lips and the clean heavy scent of her body made his face as warm as if he were standing before a fire. The portraits on the wall were blotted out.

She swiveled her rounded hips to deposit another clump of hair in the wooden bowl. For one moment her thigh rested against his arm and he could feel the silky skin even through the heavy black dress. He made his body steady as a rock. She leaned against him harder. To keep himself from pulling up her skirt and clasping those thighs, he said jokingly, "Are we Samson and Delilah?"

She stepped away from him suddenly. And he was surprised by the tears running down her face. Without thinking he put his hands on her body and pulled her closer. Slowly she reached out and lay the silver scissors across the mound of brown hair that filled the wooden bowl.

And then his hands were under her black mourning dress and clutching her warm thighs. She bent down and covered his mouth with hers as if she would swallow it. Their initial tenderness was a second's spark that roared into an animal passion fed by her three years of chaste widowhood, his springing from the sweet lust of a young man who had never tasted the love of a woman but only the bought exercise of whores.

For that first moment, Guiliano lost all sense of himself and his world. La Venera's body was so lush, and it burned with a tropical heat that went to his very bones. Her breasts were fuller than he could ever have imagined; the black widow's dress had cleverly disguised and protected them. At the sight of those oval globes of flesh he felt the blood pounding in his head. And then they were on the floor making love and taking off their clothing at the same time. She kept whispering, "Turi, Turi," in an agonized voice, but he said nothing. He was lost in the smell, the heat and fleshiness of her body. When they finished, she led him into the bedroom and they made love again. He could not believe the pleasure he found in her body, and even felt some dismay at his own surrender and was only comforted that she succumbed even more completely.

When he fell asleep she stared down into his face for a long time. She imprinted it on her memory in fear she would never see him alive again. For she remembered the last night she had slept with her husband before he died, when she had turned her back after making love and fallen asleep and ever since could not remember the sweet mask that comes over every lover's face. She had turned her back because she could not bear the fearful nervousness of her husband when he was in the house, his terror of being trapped so that he could never fall asleep, the way he started up if she rose from the bed to cook or do some chore. She marveled now at Guiliano's calm; she loved him for it. She loved him because, unlike her husband, he did not bring his guns to bed, he did not interrupt his lovemaking to listen for the sound of lurking enemies, he did not smoke or drink and tell his fears. He was gentle in his speech, but took his pleasure with fearless and concentrated passion. She rose noiselessly from the bed and still he did not stir. She waited a moment and then went out and into the kitchen to cook him her best dish.

When he left her house in the morning he went through the front door, stepping out carelessly but with guns hidden beneath his jacket. He had told her he would not stop to say goodbye to his mother and asked her to do so for him, to let her know he was safe. She was frightened at his boldness, not knowing he had a small army in the town, not noticing that he had held her door open a few minutes before he went out so that Pisciotta would be warned and would eliminate any carabinieri going by.

She kissed him goodbye with a shyness that moved him and then she whispered, "When will you come to see me again?"

"Whenever I come to see my mother, I'll come to you afterward." he said. "In the mountains I'll dream about you every night." And at these words she felt an overwhelming joy that she had made him happy.

She waited until noon before she went down the street to see Guiliano's mother. Maria Lombardo had only to see her face to know what had happened. La Venera looked ten years younger. Her dark brown eyes had black flecks dancing in them, her cheeks were rosy with color, and for the first time in almost four years she wore a dress that was not black. It was the frilly dress beribboned with velvet that a girl wears to show the mother of her lover. Maria Lombardo felt a rush of gratitude for her friend, for her loyalty and her courage and also a certain satisfaction that her plans had come out so well. This would be a wonderful arrangement for her son, a woman who would never be a traitor, a woman who could never make a permanent claim upon him. Though she loved her son fiercely she felt no jealousy. Except when La Venera told how she had cooked her best dish, a pie stuffed with rabbit meat and chunks of strong cheese riddled with fat grains of pepper, and how Turi had devoured enough for five men and sworn he had never eaten anything better in his life.

CHAPTER 15

Even in Sicily, a land where men killed each other with the same ferocious enthusiasm with which the Spaniards slaughtered bulls, the murderous madness of the citizens of Corleone inspired a universal dread. Rival families exterminated each other in a quarrel over a single olive tree, neighbors might kill each other over the amount of water one took from a communal stream, a man could die from love – that is, if he looked too disrespectfully at a wife or daughter. Even the cool-headed Friends of the Friends succumbed to this madness and their different branches warred to death in Corleone until Don Croce brought them to peace.

In such a town, Stefano Andolini had earned the nickname of Fra Diavalo, Brother Devil.

Don Croce had summoned him from Corleone and instructed him. He was to join Guiliano's band and win their confidence. He was to stay with them until Don Croce gave orders as to his future course of action. Meanwhile he was to send back information as to Guiliano's real strength, the loyalty of Passatempo and Terranova. Since Pisciotta's loyalty was unquestioned there remained only to evaluate that young man's weaknesses. And if the opportunity arose, Andolini was to kill Guiliano.

Andolini had no fear of the great Guiliano. Also, since he was redheaded, and redheads were so rare in Italy, Stefano Andolini secretly believed he had been excused from the rules of virtue. As a gambler believes his system can never lose, so Stefano Andolini believed himself so cunning he could never be outwitted.

He picked two young picciotti to go with him, that is, apprentice killers, who had not yet been admitted to the Mafia but hoped for that honor. They journeyed into the mountain haunts of Guiliano carrying knapsacks and lupare and sure enough were picked up by a roving patrol headed by Pisciotta.

Pisciotta listened to Stefano Andolini's story with an impassive face. Andolini told him that the carabinieri and Security Police were looking for him because of the murder of a Socialist agitator in Corleone. This was quite true. What Andolini did not say was that the police and carabinieri had no proof and were merely seeking him for questioning. A questioning that would be more kindly than exhaustive due to the influence of Don Croce. Andolini also told Pisciotta that the two picciotti with him were men who were also being sought by the police as co-conspirators in the killing. This was also true. But as he was telling this story Stefano Andolini felt a mounting uneasiness. Pisciotta was listening with the expression of a man who has met someone he has known before or of whom he has heard a great deal.

Andolini said that he had come into the mountains in the hope of joining Guiliano's band. And then he played his trump card. He had the stamp of approval from Guiliano's father himself. He, Stefano Andolini, was a cousin of the great Don Vito Corleone, in America. Pisciotta nodded. Andolini went on. Don Vito Corleone had been born an Andolini in the village of Corleone. His father killed, himself hunted as a boy, he had escaped to America where he had become the great Godfather. When he had returned to Sicily to wreak vengeance on his father's murderers, Stefano Andolini had been one of his picciotti. Thereafter he had visited the Don in America to receive his reward. While there he had met Guiliano's father who worked as a bricklayer on the Don's new mansion on Long Island. They had become friends, and Andolini, before he came into the mountains, had stopped in Montelepre to receive the blessing of Salvatore Guiliano Senior.

Pisciotta's face became thoughtful as he listened to this story. He distrusted this man, his red hair, his face of a murderer. And Pisciotta didn't like the look of the two picciotti with Malpelo, for so he called him in the Sicilian style.

Pisciotta said to him, "I'll take you to Guiliano, but keep your lupare strapped to your shoulders until he's spoken to you. Don't unsling them without permission."

Stefano Andolini grinned widely and said with the utmost affability, "But I recognized you, Aspanu, I trust you. Take my lupara off my shoulder and your men can do the same with my picciotti here. After we speak with Guiliano I'm sure he'll return our guns."

Pisciotta said, "We're not pack animals to carry your weapons for you. Carry them yourselves." And he led the way through the mountains to Guiliano's hideout on the edge of the cliff overlooking Montelepre.

More than fifty of the band were scattered around the cliff cleaning guns and repairing equipment. Guiliano was seated at the table, watching through his binoculars.

Pisciotta talked to Guiliano before he had the new recruits brought forward. He told all the circumstances and then he said, "Turi, he seems a little 'moldy' to me." "Moldy," the Sicilian idiom for a man who informs.

"And you think you've seen him before?" Guiliano asked.

"Or heard of him," Pisciotta said. "He is familiar to me somehow, but redheaded men are rare. I should remember him."

Guiliano said quietly, "You heard about him from La Venera. She called him Malpelo – she didn't know his name was Andolini. She told me about him too. He joined her husband's band. A month later her husband was ambushed and killed by the carabinieri. La Venera didn't trust him either. He was full of little tricks, she said."

Silvestro came over to them. "Don't trust that redhead. I've seen him at Palermo headquarters for private visits with the Commandant of Carabinieri. ''

Guiliano said, "Go down to Montelepre and bring my father here. Meanwhile keep them under guard."

Pisciotta sent Terranova to fetch Guiliano's father and then he went to the three men, who were sitting on the ground. He bent down and picked up Stefano Andolini's weapon. Members of the band encircled the three men like wolves surrounding a fallen prey. "You don't mind if I relieve you of the task of caring for this weapon now?" Pisciotta asked with a grin. Stefano Andolini looked startled for a moment, his face twisting into a grimace. Then he shrugged. Pisciotta tossed the lupara to one of his men.

He waited for a few moments, making sure his men were ready. Then he reached down to take the lupare from Andolini's two picciotti. One of them, more from fear than malice, pushed Pisciotta away and put his hand on his shotgun. In the next moment, quickly as a snake baring its tongue, a knife appeared in Pisciotta's hand. His body darted forward and the knife cut the picciotto's throat. A fountain of pink blood burst into the clear mountain air and the picciotto slumped over on his side. Pisciotta was straddling his body, leaning down, and another quick stroke finished the job. Then, with a series of quick kicks, he rolled the body into a gully.

The other men of Guiliano's band had sprung to their feet leveling their guns. Andolini, sitting on the ground, raised his hands in the air and looked around him beseechingly. But the other picciotto lunged for his weapon and tried to bring it around. Passatempo, standing behind him and grinning with enjoyment, emptied his pistol into the man's head. The shots echoed through the mountains. They all remained frozen, Andolini pale and shaking with fear, Passatempo holding his pistol. And then Guiliano's voice from the edge of the cliff said quietly, "Get rid of the bodies and tie that Malpelo to a tree until my father comes."

The bodies were wrapped in bamboo nets and carried to a deep crevice. They were thrown in with stones tumbled down after them to keep the stench from rising, according to old superstition. This was a task for Passatempo, who robbed the bodies before he buried them. Guiliano constantly fought against his distaste for Passatempo. No amount of rationalization could turn that animal into a knight.

It was after dusk, almost seven hours later, that Guiliano's father was finally brought into the camp. Stefano Andolini was released from his tree and brought over to the cave lit with kerosene lamps. Guiliano's father was angry when he saw Andolini's condition.

"But this man is my friend," he said to his son. "We both worked for the Godfather in America. I told him he could come and join your band, that he would be well treated."

He shook hands with Andolini and said, "I apologize. My son must have misunderstood or heard some gossip about you." He paused for a moment, troubled. It distressed him to see his old friend so full of fear. For Andolini could barely stand.

Andolini was sure he would be killed. That this was all a charade. The back of his neck ached as the muscles tensed to receive the bullets. He almost wept at his own brashness that had made him underestimate Guiliano. The quick killings of his two picciotti had sent him into shock.

Signor Guiliano sensed that his friend was in mortal danger from his son. He said to him, "Turi, how often do I ask you to do something for me? If you have anything against this man forgive him and let him go. He was kind to me in America and he sent you a gift when you were christened. I trust him and hold his friendship dear."

Guiliano said, "Now that you have identified him, he will be treated as an honored guest. If he wishes to remain as a member of my band he is welcome."

Guiliano's father was taken back to Montelepre by horse so that he could sleep in his own bed. And after he was gone Guiliano spoke to Stefano Andolini alone.

"I know about you and Candeleria," he said. "You were a spy for Don Croce when you joined Candeleria's band. A month later Candeleria was dead. His widow remembers you. From what she told me it wasn't hard for me to figure out what happened. We Sicilians are good at putting together puzzles of treacheries. Bands of outlaws are disappearing. The authorities have become amazingly clever. I sit on my mountain and think all day. I think of the authorities in Palermo – they have never been so clever before. And then I learn that the Minister of Justice in Rome and Don Croce are hand in glove. And we know, you and I, that Don Croce is clever enough for both of them. So then it is Don Croce who is clearing away these bandits for Rome. And then I think soon it will be my turn to be visited by the spies of Don Croce. And I wait and I wait and I wonder why the Don is taking so long. For, with all modesty, I am the biggest prize of all. And then today I see the three of you in my binoculars. And I think, 'Ha, it's Malpelo again. I will be glad to see him.' But I must kill you all the same. I won't distress my father so your body will disappear."

Stefano Andolini lost his fear for a moment in his outrage. "You would deceive your own father?" he shouted. "You call yourself a Sicilian son?" He spat on the ground. "Then kill me and go straight down to hell."

Pisciotta, Terranova and Passatempo were also astonished. But they had been astonished many times in the past. Guiliano who was so honorable, who prided himself on keeping his word, who spoke always of justice for everyone, would suddenly turn and do something that seemed to them villainous. It was not that they objected to him killing Andolini – he could kill a hundred Andolinis, a thousand. But that he should break his word to his father and deceive him seemed to them unforgivable. Only Corporal Silvestro seemed to understand and said, "He can't endanger all our lives because his father is softhearted."

Guiliano said to Andolini in a quiet voice, "Make your peace with God." He motioned to Passatempo. "You will have five minutes."

Andolini's red hair seemed to bristle all over his head. He said frantically, "Before you kill me speak to the Abbot Manfredi."

Guiliano stared at him with amazement and the redheaded man spoke in an outpouring of words. "You once said to the Abbot that you owed him a service. That he could ask you for anything." Guiliano remembered his promise well. How did the man know about it?

Andolini continued, "Let us go to him and he will beg for my life."

Pisciotta said contemptuously, "Turi, it will take another day to send a messenger and get his answer back. And does the Abbot have more influence with you than your own father?"

Guiliano astonished them again. "Bind his arms and put a halter on his feet so that he can walk but not run. Give me a guard of ten men. I'll bring him to the monastery myself, and if the Abbot does not ask for his life, he can make his last confession. I'll execute him and give his body to the monks for burial."

Guiliano and his band arrived at the monastery gates as the sun was rising and the monks were going out to work the fields. Turi Guiliano watched them, a smile on his lips. Was it only two years ago that he had gone into the fields with these priests, wearing his brown cloak and the crumpled black American fedora on his head? He remembered how this amused him. Who would have dreamed then of his future ferocity? A nostalgia came for those old days of peace working in the fields.

The Abbot himself was coming toward the gate to greet them. The tall black-robed figure hesitated when the prisoner stepped forward, then opened his arms. Stefano Andolini rushed to embrace the old man, kissed him on both cheeks and said, " Father. these men are going to kill me, only you can save me."

The Abbot nodded. He held out his arms to Guiliano, who came forward to embrace him. Guiliano understood everything now. The peculiar accent on the word "Father" was not how a man addressed his priest but as a son addressed his parent.

The Abbot said, "I ask you for this man's life, as a boon to me."

Guiliano took the ropes off Andolini's arms and feet. "He is yours," Turi Guiliano said.

Andolini was sagging to the ground; the fear rushing out of his body made him weak. The Abbot supported him with his own frail frame. He said to Guiliano, "Come into my dining room. I will have your men fed and the three of us can talk about what we must do." He turned to Andolini and said, "My dear son, you are not yet out of danger. What will Don Croce think when he learns of all this? We must take counsel together or you are lost."

The Abbot had his own small coffee room and the three men sat comfortably. Cheese and bread were brought for the two younger men.

The Abbot turned and smiled sadly at Guiliano. "One of my many sins. I fathered this man when I was young. Ah, nobody knows the temptations of a parish priest in Sicily. I did not resist them. The scandal was covered up and his mother was married to an Andolini. A great deal of money passed and I was able to rise in the Church. But the irony of heaven no man can foretell. My son grew up to be a murderer. And that is a cross I have to bear though I have so many of my own sins to answer for."

The Abbot's tone changed when he turned to Andolini. He said, "Listen to me carefully, my son. For a second time you owe your life to me. Understand your first loyalty. It is now to Guiliano."

"You cannot go back to the Don. He will ask himself, Why did Turi spare your life and kill the other two? He will suspect treachery and that will be your death. What you must do is confess everything to the Don and ask to remain with Guiliano's band. That you will give him information and serve as a link between the Friends of the Friends and Guiliano's army. I will go to the Don myself and tell him the advantages of this. I will also tell him that you will remain faithful to Guiliano but that will not be to his disadvantage. He will think you will betray this man here who spared your life. But I tell you that if you do not remain faithful to Guiliano I will damn you to hell forever. You will bear your father's curse to the grave."

He addressed himself again to Guiliano. "So now I ask you a second favor, my dear Turi Guiliano. Take my son into your band. He will fight for you and do your bidding and I swear he will be faithful to you."

Guiliano thought about this carefully. He was sure he could, with time, secure Andolini's affection, and he knew the man's devotion to his father, the Abbot. The chances of betrayal were therefore small and could be guarded against. Stefano Andolini would be a valuable subchief in the operations of his band but even more valuable as a source of information about the empire of Don Croce.

Guiliano asked, "And what will you tell Don Croce?"

The Abbot paused for a moment. "I will speak to the Don. I have influence there. And then we shall see. Now will you take my son into your band?"

"Yes, by my sworn word to you," Guiliano said. "But if he betrays me your prayers will not be swift enough to catch him on his way to hell."

Stefano Andolini had lived in a world of little trust which perhaps was why over the years his face had become formed in such a murderer's mask. He knew that in the coming years he would be like a trapeze artist, constantly teetering on the wire of death. There was no safe choice. It comforted him that the spirit of mercy that radiated from Guiliano's person had saved him. But he had no illusions. Turi Guiliano was the only man who had ever made him afraid.

From that day Stefano Andolini was a member of Guiliano's band. And in the years to come he became so known for ferociousness and religious piety that his nickname, Fra Diavalo, became famous all over Sicily. The piety came from the fact that every Sunday he went to Mass. He usually went in the town of Villaba, where Father Beniamino was the priest. And in the confessional he told the secrets of Guiliano's band to his confessor to be relayed to Don Croce. But not the secrets Guiliano ordered him not to tell.