The Sicilian - Mario Puzo [9]
She ignored her husband and Stefan Andolini, she spoke directly to Michael. “Have you come to help my son or not?” The other two men looked embarrassed at the rudeness of her question, but Michael smiled at her gravely.
“Yes, I am with you.”
Some of the tension went out of her, and she bowed her head into her hands as if she had expected a blow. Andolini said to her in a soothing voice, “Father Benjamino asked to come, I told him you did not wish it.”
Maria Lombardo raised her head and Michael marveled at how her face showed every emotion she felt. The scorn, the hatred, the fear, the irony of her words matching the flinty smile, the grimaces she could not repress. “Oh, Father Benjamino has a good heart, without a doubt,” she said. “And with that good heart of his he is like the plague, he brings death to an entire village. He is like the sisal plant—brush against him and you will bleed. And he brings the secrets of the confessional to his brother, he sells the souls in his keeping to the devil.”
Guiliano’s father said with quiet reasonableness, as if he were trying to quiet a madman, “Don Croce is our friend. He had us released from prison.”
Guiliano’s mother burst out furiously, “Ah, Don Croce, ‘The Good Soul,’ how kind he is always. But let me tell you, Don Croce is a serpent. He aims a gun forward and slaughters his friend by his side. He and our son were going to rule Sicily together, and now Turi is hiding alone in the mountains and ‘The Good Soul’ is free as air in Palermo with his whores. Don Croce has only to whistle and Rome licks his feet. And yet he has committed more crimes than our Turi. He is evil and our son is good. Ah, if I were a man like you I would kill Don Croce. I would put ‘The Good Soul’ to rest.” She made a gesture of disgust. “You men understand nothing.”
Guiliano’s father said impatiently, “I understand our guest must be on the road in a few hours and that he must eat something before we can talk.”
Guiliano’s mother suddenly became quite different. She was solicitous. “Poor man, you’ve traveled all day to see us, you had to listen to Don Croce’s lies and my ravings. Where do you go?”
“I must be in Trapani by morning,” Michael said. “I stay with friends of my father until your son comes to me.”
There was a stillness in the room. He sensed they all knew his history. They saw the wound he had lived with for two years, the caved-in side of his face. Guiliano’s mother came to him and gave him a quick embrace.
“Have a glass of wine,” she said. “Then you go for a walk through the town. Food will be waiting on the table within the hour. And by that time Turi’s friends will have arrived and we can talk sensibly.”
Andolini and Guiliano’s father put Michael between them and strolled down the narrow, cobbled streets of Montelepre, the stones gleaming black now that the sun had fallen out of the sky. In the hazy blue air before twilight, only the figures of the National Police, the carabinieri, moved around them. At every intersection, thin snakelike alleyways ran like venom off the Via Bella. The town seemed deserted.
“This was once a lively town,” Guiliano’s father said. “Always, always very poor, like all of Sicily, a lot of misery, but it was alive. Now more than seven hundred of our citizens are in jail, arrested for conspiracy with my son. They are innocent, most of them, but the government arrests them to frighten the others, to make them inform against my Turi. There are over two thousand National Police around this town and other thousands hunt Turi in the mountains. And so people no longer eat their dinner out of doors, their children can no longer play in the street. The police are such cowards they fire their guns if a rabbit runs across the road. There is a curfew after dark, and if a woman of the town wants to visit a neighbor