The Sicilian - Mario Puzo [127]
By the time Silvio Ferra found his wife and children, the machine guns had stopped. His family was unhurt and were starting to rise from the ground. He flung them down again and made them stay prone for another fifteen minutes. He saw a man on a horse galloping toward Piani dei Greci to get help from the carabinieri barracks, and when the man was not shot off his horse he knew the attack was over. He got up.
From the tabletop of the plain that crowned the Portella della Ginestra, thousands of people were streaming back to their villages at the bottom of the mountains. And on the ground were the dead and wounded, their families crouched over them weeping. The proud banners they had carried that morning were lying in the dust, their dark golds, brilliant greens and solitary reds startlingly bright in the noon sun. Silvio Ferra left his family to help the wounded. He stopped some of the fleeing men and made them serve as stretcher bearers. He saw with horror that some of the dead were children, and some were women. He felt the tears come to his eyes. All his teachers were wrong, those believers in political action. Voters would never change Sicily. It was all foolishness. They would have to murder to get their rights.
It was Hector Adonis who brought the news to Guiliano at Pisciotta’s bedside. Guiliano immediately went to his mountain headquarters, leaving Pisciotta to recover without his personal protection.
There on the cliffs above Montelepre, he summoned Passatempo and Terranova.
“Let me warn you before you speak,” Guiliano began. “Whoever is responsible will be found out no matter how long it takes. And the longer it takes the more severe the punishment. If it was an honest mistake, confess now and I promise you won’t suffer death.”
Passatempo and Terranova had never seen such fury in Guiliano before. They stood rigid, not daring to move as Guiliano interrogated them. They swore their guns had been elevated to fire over the heads of the crowd, and when they had observed the people being hit, they had halted the guns.
Guiliano next questioned the men in the squads and the men on the machine guns. He pieced the scene together. Terranova’s machine gun had fired about five minutes before being halted. Passatempo’s about ten minutes. The gunners swore they had fired above the heads of the crowds. None of them would admit they had possibly made an error or depressed the angle of the guns in any way.
After he dismissed them, Guiliano sat alone. He felt, for the first time since he had become a bandit, a sense of intolerable shame. In more than four years as an outlaw he could boast that he had never harmed the poor. That boast was no longer true. He had massacred them. In his innermost heart he could no longer think of himself as a hero. Then he thought over the possibilities. It could have been a mistake: His band was fine with lupare, but the heavy machine guns were not too familiar to them. Firing downward, it was possible they had misjudged the angle. He could not believe that Terranova or Passatempo had played him false, but there was always the awful possibility that one or both had been bribed to commit the massacre. Also, it had occurred to him the moment he heard the news that there might have been a third ambush