The Godfather Returns (49 page)

Don Cesare was never really alone. He’d trained his
soldat
o
s and bodyguards to blend in. A casual observer wouldn’t have guessed that the young men leaning on Vespas in front of the cathedral were Don Cesare’s men, as were the four milling around outside the restaurant arguing about soccer. A casual observer might have guessed that the nondescript man in the off-the-rack suit walking across the piazza was a history teacher a few years shy of retirement, rather than a hero of the Allied invasion of Sicily and the most powerful Mafia boss in Palermo.

Though it’s also true that Palermo is a city where little is observed casually.

It was three in the afternoon, and the restaurant was closed. The waiter seeing to their table had been approved and searched by Don Cesare’s men, one of whom was stationed in the doorway. There were men downstairs, too, keeping an eye on the cooks and the back door.

Over wine and the restaurant’s legendary beef spleen sandwiches, Geraci and Indelicato discussed various details of their thriving narcotics business. They spoke entirely in English, not as any sort of security measure but because, even after all these years coming to Sicily on business, all these years surrounded by native Sicilians, Geraci’s Italian was atrocious and his Sicilian even worse. He understood it but couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t explain why. A mental block or something.

“It is good to have you in my city, my gigantic friend,” Don Cesare said, finishing his last bite and licking his fingers. “But these matters, I don’t know, I think they are not why you came all this way to speak with me?”

“I brought the family this time,” he said. “My wife and daughters. The older one is off to college in the fall. To university, I guess you’d say. It might be our last family vacation. They’d never been to your beautiful island before, and now they’ve been all over it, at least as best you can in ten days.” They’d have spent more time, but they’d had to come on an ocean liner. Nick Geraci had no intention of ever getting into an airplane again. “I actually never took the time to sightsee before. First time I’ve ever been to Taormina, if you can believe it.”

Don Cesare raised his hands in lamentation. “I own the finest hotel in Taormina. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be there? I would have seen to it that you and your family was treated like royalty.”

“You do so much for me already, Don Cesare, I wouldn’t think of imposing further.”

But Don Cesare wouldn’t let it drop until Geraci promised he’d come back to Taormina no later than next year and stay at Indelicato’s mountaintop resort.

“I do have another reason to see you in person, though, Don Cesare. It involves your young godson Carmine Marino.”

The Don frowned. “He’s all right?”

“He’s doin’ great,” Geraci said. “Possibly the best man I have. Which is why I wanted to talk to you about a job I want to give him. A valuable, important, but very dangerous job.”

Geraci was tempted to confide in him. Indelicato was a valuable, even trusted, ally. More to the point, he was the only person Geraci knew who’d worked with the CIA before. During the war, the Mafia members not banished to Ustica by the Fascists had functioned in Sicily as the Resistance had in France. Indelicato quickly emerged as one of the leaders of this violent, effective underground. Via Lucky Luciano, the deported American Don, Indelicato met with operatives from the OSS—the forerunner of the CIA—to provide intelligence that laid the groundwork for the invasion of the island. It was supposedly Indelicato who came up with the stunt of air-dropping tens of thousands of red handkerchiefs emblazoned with Luciano’s famous script
L
to alert the Sicilian people—but not the Fascist invaders from the north—to what was coming. The British, who did not collaborate with the Mafia, suffered heavy casualties in their battles to take the eastern third of the island, but on the western two thirds, particularly in the regions that were Mafia strongholds, the Americans profited from superior intelligence and sustained relatively few casualties. After the invasion, in many of the cities occupied by the Americans, the civilians installed as provisional mayors were mafiosi. When the Allies withdrew, most of the mayors stayed. And when the Dons were freed from Ustica, they returned home to find that, courtesy of the USA and the OSS, the political power of the Mafia had increased exponentially. Soon thereafter, Cesare Indelicato was elected to the Italian Parliament and helped spearhead a surprisingly popular movement to secede from Italy and become America’s forty-ninth state.

Ultimately, Geraci decided not to risk it. “I can’t give you any details,” he said. “I can only say that Carmine wants to do the job and that he’d be the leader of the other men I send.”

“You tell me this why? What reason? You want my blessing, how can I do that if I don’t know what I bless, eh?”

“If you tell me to take Carmine off this job, I’ll do it. But I can’t be specific about what we’re doing. What we have to do.”

Don Cesare considered this. “I think you are asking me to approve that my godson Carmine, who sends his mother money home every month, that he go do something where you think he will be killed, eh? If not that, you don’t need to ask me nothing.”

Geraci answered this only with silence.

“And you know he’s related to the Bocchicchio clan? I wouldn’t want to be the man who got blamed for anything that happened to him.”

Don Cesare said this with no conviction, clearly grasping at straws. Geraci knew full well who Carmine Marino’s people were.

In silence, Geraci waited Don Cesare out.

“One question, then,” Don Cesare finally said. “Carmine, he knows as much about this as you, the danger and also the reason for it, and still he want to do it,
s
ì
?”

“That’s right. Absolutely he still wants to do it.”

The Don bobbed his head back and forth, as if to show he was thinking about the repercussions of anything he might say. “Carmine is a man,” he said. “He does not need me to tell him what brave deeds he can or cannot do.”

“Thank you, Don Cesare.” Geraci felt the tremors coming on and excused himself to go to the bathroom, though all he really wanted to do was move around and concentrate on the moving so that the shaking would stop. For some reason, very little worked better in this regard than any action he could make his prick do. Urinating was in general handier than the other.

“For many reasons,” Geraci said as he sat back down at the table, “one of which being that Carmine will be in charge, I think it’s best that all the men we put on this job be Sicilians.” Another of the many reasons was that the Sicilians did not have rules against killing cops or government officials.

“You want people,” Indelicato said, “I’ll get you people.”

“I appreciate that. But I can’t risk bringing men in just for this job. I need men who’ve been in the States awhile. I don’t want to use too many of Carmine’s people either, especially, God forbid, if something should happen to the guy. I’m going to call in the pizza men, the best ones. Any objections?”

“If not for a tough job, then when, huh?”

Nearly all the men stashed in the pizza parlors had been directly or indirectly dispatched to America by Cesare Indelicato.

“A lot of those people I don’t know at all,” Geraci said.

“Of course you don’t. They don’t get in trouble, don’t have problems, what’s to know?”

“Exactly. I’ve got guys who’ve been out there seven years. Guys I’ve never laid eyes on. I need your advice, Don Cesare. If you were to recommend, say, the four best men you’ve sent over—best in terms of toughness, character, smarts—who would that be?”

Geraci had expected him to have to think about this awhile, but Don Cesare answered immediately, complete with brief descriptions of the men’s skills. If they were half the men he said they were, Geraci would have no trouble getting this done without sending Carmine.

“There’s another, unrelated matter,” Geraci said. “It involves a traitor in your midst. A man sent here from America. An inconvenient man to our Commission, or so they ruled.”

Geraci couldn’t do it himself, as of course Don Cesare understood. He was a Boss. Such things must be done by others.

The frail Capuchin monk struggled down the stairs to the convent’s catacombs. He had glaucoma and an arthritic hip, but he was determined not to become a burden to the order. He could still do all the tasks he’d done when he first came to Palermo as a young man—from the sublime of tending the garden, preparing meals for his brothers in Christ, and embalming the dead to be interred in the city cemetery next door, to the ridiculous of selling postcards to tourists and picking up the filth they left behind. Soda cans, wine bottles, spent flashbulbs (photography was explicitly forbidden), and even, once, a used prophylactic.

It was after lunch: almost three, when the catacombs would reopen to the public. A German tour group milled around outside the barred iron doors. As the monk descended farther, their vulgar noise receded. He smiled and thanked almighty God for allowing him to recognize that even diminished hearing can be a gift from on high.

At the base of the stairs was a candy wrapper. The monk’s knees cracked as he stooped to pick it up.

In the tunnels before him were the crumbling, finely dressed remains of eight thousand Sicilians. Many were hung from hooks in long rows, their skulls bowed in what the monk liked to think of as humility. Others lay on shelves and tucked into recessed alcoves, floor to ceiling. A few reclined in wooden coffins, heads resting on pillows covered by a film of dust that had once been flesh. In life, they’d been dukes and countesses, cardinals and important priests, military heroes who fought alongside Garibaldi and those who drew their swords against him. Some, including the monk’s own grandfather, had been defiled in their mortal lives by their association with what Sicilians call the Friends. Eight thousand dead: people who paid the order handsomely so that their remains or those of their loved ones could be displayed here. The folly of this was not lost on the old monk. With one exception
—La bambina,
whose presence the monk had helped arrange—the order had stopped accepting bodies in 1881, eighty years ago, two years after the monk was born. For the most part, these people who’d wanted so badly to be remembered had been forgotten by all but their Creator. Few if any of the children in these catacombs—including an entire chamber filled with them—were mourned by a living soul. The corporeal rot of these eight thousand had been slowed by skilled Capuchin embalmers and by the cool, dry air, but, except for
La bambina,
rot and earthly oblivion had come nonetheless.

He bore left, scanning the floor for debris or fallen body parts. His grandparents, who came from the tiny town of Corleone, were among those hung vertically. His grandfather wore a green velvet coat (underneath, the gunshot wound in his back gaped open and a steel rod was all that kept the powdery-boned torso from collapsing). His grandmother (an arm had dropped off some time ago and been loosely reattached with wire) wore her wedding dress. When the monk had first arrived, they, like many of the dead, still had faces. For a half century he’d watched the day-by-day disappearance of their eyes and skin. He kissed his fingertips, applied them spider delicately to the foreheads of his ancestors, mumbled a prayer for their souls, and hurried on.

At the end of the tunnel was
La bambina,
the lovely two-year-old girl who’d died in 1920 and become one of Sicily’s most popular tourist attractions. The doctor who embalmed her had taunted the monks about the new procedure he’d invented. Before anyone learned his secret, he, too, died (from the deadly sin of pride, the monk would tell the younger brothers, though the prosaic cause was a ruptured spleen). The old monk had spent many reflective hours studying the doctor’s pitiful notes and the girl herself, fruitlessly trying to guess what the doctor had done. The baby with the long blond hair in that glass-covered coffin had been in there for forty-one years. She looked as though she’d died a few days ago.

As the monk approached
La bambina,
his cloudy eyes seemed to be playing tricks on him. Against the wall near the poor babe was a body as well preserved as hers.

He rubbed his eyes. It was a bald man in a raincoat. Diamonds gleamed from the rings on his fingers and the bar across his fat tie. The dead were not interred here wearing jewelry. Then the monk saw the distinct black lines on either side of the man’s mouth and felt a wave of relief.

It was a huge marionette. The jewelry must be fake. An odd prank, but the monk had lived in Palermo a long time and had learned not to be surprised by anything that happened here.

He drew nearer.

The puppet lines beside Laughing Sal Narducci’s mouth were actually rivulets of blood.

The rope used to garrote him—just before noon, when the catacombs closed for lunch—lay on the floor beside the dead man’s shiny shoes.

The monk took in this grim tableau, in this strange and holy place, and something inside his heart broke. A common thief would have taken the jewels. An ordinary killer would have hidden the body, not left it
here,
in the same chamber with
La bambina
! The monk shouted a stream of curses at the Friends. Who else would do such a thing? He had devoted his life to paying penance for his family’s violent tradition, but again and again it sought him out. And now, so late in life, this atrocity. It felt cruelly inevitable. Rage filled him like a poison. His curses grew louder.

The brothers who ran to his aid told the authorities that when the beloved old man collapsed and died, his face was as red as the rightmost stripe of the Italian flag.

When, from the killer himself, Cesare Indelicato heard what had happened—on the terrace of his cliffside villa, overlooking the medieval city he essentially ruled—he marveled at God’s bleak sense of humor. Don Cesare had never met the poor monk, but he recognized the man’s name. It had been Don Cesare’s grandfather, Felice Crapisi, who killed the monk’s traitorous grandfather. Even more strangely, Don Cesare had been asked to kill Narducci twice (first by Thomas Hagen, then by Nick Geraci). The trusted
soldato
he’d sent had killed Narducci only once, yet the bloody poetics of the Creator saw fit to transform that lone killing into two deaths.