The Sicilian - Mario Puzo [77]
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