Blood Alone (15 page)
“
Cazzo!
” He spat out the curse as he raised the Beretta. In one fluid motion, Salvatore pulled on the leather strap with his right hand and the
lupara
appeared in it, a blast from both barrels knocking the bandit onto his back, two neat blackened holes, seeping red, right over his heart. As he reloaded Salvatore walked over to the dead man and picked up the Beretta. He found a spare clip in the man’s jacket pocket and brought both over to me.
The other bandits stood quietly at a respectful distance, their weapons slung over their shoulders. The grove of trees was quiet as the coppery smell of fresh blood rose from the ground.
Salvatore handed me the Beretta and the ammunition clip. “
Un
regalo
,” he said.
I was too busy reading the tattoo on his chest to react. In a bold arc across the top of his chest were the words VIVA LA MALAVITA. “What does he mean?” I asked, looking at Sciafani.
“A gift, he is giving it to you as a gift.”
“
Grazie, grazie,
” I said to Salvatore with sincerity. “But what does this mean?” I tapped on the tattoo. Salvatore smiled and buttoned up.
“Long live the underworld, the life of crime. It proclaims who he is, a man of honor.”
I watched as the band of bandits made their way back into the woods, carrying German boots and uniforms and other debris the convoy had left behind. They could have massacred us. But they were afraid, afraid someone would see, or simply afraid of killing a
mafiusu.
“He’s a member of the Mafia,” I said.
“It is only the newspapers that use that word, although it has become more widespread now. The entire purpose of the organization was to be secret. It was never really named. You have heard of c
osa nostra?
”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s another name for the Mob.”
“Here in Sicily, it is called a society. And members of that society refer to it as ‘our thing.’ Which translates as
cosa nostra
. So you see, there is no real name for it, other than the labels outsiders create for it. The life of the underworld. That is what it is.”
“How do you know so much about it, Dottor?”
“Let us bury you again, Billy, under the almonds.”
“Are you part of
cosa nostra?
Are you
mafiusu?
”
“You ask too many questions. In Sicily that can be unhealthy,” Sciafani said.
“It’s been nice getting to know you so well, Dottor,” I said as I slipped into the cart and pushed away almonds from my hiding place. “How far to Agrigento?”
“Two or three hours, if you do not have to see a horse again.”
“See a man
about
a horse,” I corrected him as I pulled the blanket over me and they piled on the almonds.
I was certain there was something Sciafani was keeping from me. I didn’t know what it was, but I figured it was about his past, reaching back into his childhood. What worried me was why he would bother lying about anything to me. What could it possibly matter?
I may be nuts, I thought to myself, but I felt a whole lot safer with the Beretta in my pocket. I might be
nuts
? It would have been funny if it had not been such a distinct possibility.
I SPENT THE NEXT three hours thinking about the last time I had been in Agrigento, or at least what I could remember. It was a bit hazy. I had met Nick Cammarata before the mission. He was a Naval Intelligence officer, recruited for his knowledge of Sicilian. He’d been born in the States, but his parents had emigrated from Sicily so he’d grown up speaking the Sicilian dialect at home and English on the streets of Brooklyn. There was even a village with the family name somewhere in the mountains, not far from Villalba. Nick had hoped he could get there when the shooting was over to look up his aunts and uncles.
Some navy commander had brought Nick and four other agents to Allied Forces HQ a month before the invasion. They each had a different mission. Nick had been paired with me, since Uncle Ike wanted to keep tabs on the Mafia angle. The whole thing had almost been called off when one of the guys let slip he’d been brought to the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence by Joe Adonis, head of the rackets in Brooklyn, who worked for none other than Lucky Luciano himself. While some of the brass was nervous about the Mob connection, others would have been glad to shake hands with the devil himself to get the upper hand in this invasion. Uncle Ike wasn’t sure either way, except I remember him telling me how Don Calo’s cooperation would save lives.
I could see Nick’s face, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t place him on this island. The last thing I remembered was seeing him on the deck of Harry’s MTB, leaving the dock in North Africa. Harry’s face came to me easily enough, especially that last moment when he came into view rounding the stone column before the grenade exploded. I could feel the cool darkness of the night and the pressure of the explosion in my eardrums, see the bright flash, and hear the frantic yelling in Italian and English. Had Nick been there? How had we ended up at the Valley of the Temples, shooting up the ancient ruins? Had we been betrayed?
English. If there had been yelling in English, it must have come from Nick. Harry would have been standing right where the grenade went off. The cry I’d heard hadn’t been one of pain, it was more controlled and urgent than anguished. What had Nick been saying?
Nothing came to me and I tried not to think about it too hard. That was the best way to remember. Let it roll over in your mind a few times, my dad used to say. Your mind is busy all day, he’d told me, so don’t expect too much of it. It’s got a lot to handle, so let the problem roll around in there for a while, and maybe your subconscious will earn its keep. It doesn’t have anything else to do.
My dad said a lot of things. Some of them made great sense, and some were just to have something to say. Others I wasn’t sure about. This was one of those, but I had to give it a try. So I thought about something else.
The note. The note about purgatory and happiness really bothered me. It matched a message Nick had been given for his Mafia contact, a code of sorts that only a Sicilian would understand. A Sicilian from around Agrigento. That little village of Cammarata was no more than twenty miles north of here. Nick wouldn’t have needed to keep it written down, so how had that piece of paper gotten into Rocko’s hands? More important, how had the message itself been communicated? The only people besides Nick who would have possessed this information were in North Africa, unless you counted the Mafia contact who had passed it on in the first place. Which was interesting, since the
mafiusu
were in the mountains and Rocko would have been stationed at the beachhead. I couldn’t figure that out either, so I took my father’s advice again and let my subconscious work on it.
Late in the afternoon we climbed a steep hill, the donkey clip-clopping up switchbacks slowly. Salvatore and Sciafani both got out of the cart to lighten the load. Lucky me, I got to stay buried under the almonds. We pulled off the road, and Salvatore unhitched the donkey to let him feed on the grass.
Sciafani lowered the rear of the cart. “We are almost to Agrigento.
Look.”
I got out, thankfully for the last time. I brushed almonds from my clothes and tried to straighten up. As I did, I saw Agrigento, the setting sun hitting its walls, turning them to gold as shadows reached like greedy fingers across the rooftops. It was a beautiful city set high on the next hillside, a small valley of green split by a wide stream beneath it. I could hear church bells chiming the hour.
Salvatore closed up the cart as he and Sciafani exchanged words. I shook his hand, said
Grazie
, and smiled. He gave me a little salute and then went to tend to his donkey.
“We should wait until dark before we enter the city,” Sciafani said.
“Salvatore must go to his relatives now. It is too dangerous for him to take us further.”
“Where should we—” Sciafani stared at something over my shoulder, and I turned to see what he was looking at. A cloud of dust kicked up from the road down in the valley, and the sound of an engine downshifting painfully and straining up the hill toward us echoed from below. He grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a line of thick shrubs. We flattened ourselves and waited. Salvatore held on to the donkey as he stood in the open, his shotgun hung carelessly from his shoulder, his lethal speed hidden by a posture of peasant lethargy.
An ancient truck heaved itself up over the crest of the hill. It had no military markings but was crammed full of khaki-clad soldiers standing in the back and on the running boards, hanging onto the truck, grasping short Italian carbines.
“Fascist militia, MVSN,” Sciafani said in whisper, even though at this distance, with all the noise the truck was making, he could have yelled it.
The truck stopped as soon as the road leveled out, and the soldiers burst into activity, handing down cases of ammo from the back of the truck, and lifting out a heavy machine gun and tripod. An officer, his dress uniform complete with the official Fascist black shirt, stepped from the passenger seat and scanned the horizon with binoculars. He looked east, to the left of the city, which I judged to be due south of us. “We must be making a move,” I said, my voice a whisper now that the truck was silent. I imagined GIs advancing up that hill into machine-gun fire.
Then I thought about Sciafani. Fascists or no, these were his countrymen. There was still no “we” between us, no matter how friendly he’d been. I wondered if he would want to stay with them, to tend their wounded, if it came to that. I wondered if he was tempted to turn me in. I glanced at him but his expression gave nothing away. For the first time, I felt a shiver of mistrust. Sciafani had been a willing traveling partner at first, but after the encounter with Vito Genovese and Legs, something had changed. Was it seeing the German shoot Signor Ciccolo? Perhaps. But there was something mysterious about the story of Sciafani being adopted, especially after all the talk about trusting only blood relatives. I realized he was here for his own reasons. They coincided with mine for now, but I needed to pay attention and be alert to any change.
The Blackshirt pointed at Salvatore and yelled. Two soldiers marched over, waving their hands for him to leave. He argued with them, gesturing from his cart to Agrigento, probably complaining about not getting to the market. They shook their heads, and he resignedly hitched up the donkey, complaining the whole time. He did a good job of maintaining their focus on him as he moved away, keeping up a stream of Italian that sounded like insults mixed with bewilderment. As he passed our hiding place he winked.
We watched the militiamen set up the machine-gun emplacement. There were about twenty of them. They dug foxholes on either side of the road and a firing pit protected by sandbags for the machine gun. Off in the distance, to the east, a dark plume of smoke appeared. The officer turned his binoculars on to it, then got into the truck and took off, back down the hill. For reinforcements maybe.
“Are these Fascists good fighters?” I asked Sciafani. I was hoping they were nothing more than local militia who might skedaddle for home as soon as the first shots sounded.
“I have seen a battalion of Blackshirts attack British tanks with hand grenades,” he said. “I have seen others cower in their holes. Some Fascist units are very well trained, others less so. Most of the Blackshirts here are not from Sicily.”
“So they’ll probably fight?”
“It is a good position. I would say yes, they will fight.”
“We should get out of here.” I stated the obvious while looking to our rear.
“That will be difficult,” Sciafani said. He was right. While we had cover between us and the militia, there was nothing but bare rocky ground behind us. Once we left the shrubs, we’d be in the open long enough for them to spot us, either going down the hill or back the way we had come.
“We have to stay put until it gets dark,” I said.
“Yes, and pray one of them does not walk over here to see a man and his horse,” Sciafani said. He had the basic idea, so I didn’t correct him.
We waited. The truck came back and more men got out. The truck was towing a 20mm antiaircraft gun, and the crew hustled to unhook it and set it up. As if to taunt them, a single aircraft zoomed out of the western sky, the sun at its back. I couldn’t raise my head high enough to identify it, but the machine gun gave it a few ineffective bursts before it climbed out of sight. They moved the 20mm gun to the side of the road opposite the machine gun so their positions formed a semicircle, facing east. We’d have to move around to the right and hope there wasn’t another unit doing the same thing on the other side of the hill. We waited some more, listening to the sound of digging and idle chatter that could have come from enlisted men in any army. Nervous laughter, jokes, complaints about the hard ground, bad food, and indifferent officers. I’d been in the army a little more than a year and already the rhythm of daily life in camp or at the front had become part of me. It was easy to recognize the sounds soldiers made, their ability to show contempt for the service while at the same time quietly demonstrating their bond to each other. The tone and tempo of the words didn’t sound any different in Italian, and it almost made me homesick for life in a GI camp.
Memories of North Africa flowed unbidden through my mind.
Uncle Ike had his headquarters in a fancy villa. I was in a nice tent with a wood floor up off the sand. It wasn’t as nice as the Hotel St. George, where Kaz had managed to get us a room when we first arrived in Algiers, but we weren’t living in foxholes either. There were dinners and receptions at the villa, and once in a while Kaz and I would be invited, especially if the guest was a visiting congressman from a Polish or Irish ward. Uncle Ike didn’t like having to entertain politicians, but when he did, he did it right. Harry Butcher would show them around, make sure they met some GIs from their district, take their pictures, bring them to a villa on the beach for a swim, then for a fancy dinner with the general, plenty of booze and cigars all around. There might even be one going on right now, I thought. Cocktails, maybe. Perhaps Diana was there, wearing her brown FANY uniform as if it were a gown, the wide leather belt polished to a gleam, the brass buttons sparkling like diamonds. She loved that uniform. It had been tailor-made for her, sent from England after she decided to accept the posting SOE had offered her in their North African operation. The first time she tried it on after her last mission, it hung off her thin frame, a wide gap between collar and neck. We both pretended not to notice.
FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, was an outfit that provided the Brit army with women trained to operate switchboards, drive trucks, that sort of thing. It also was a source of agents for the Special Operations Executive. Diana had volunteered after she had served as a switchboard operator with the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, and made it out of France at Dunkirk. The destroyer she was on was sunk by Stukas, and by the time she had been picked up, she’d watched the wounded who had been on stretchers slide off the deck and disappear beneath the waves. Diana had told me about that the first day we met. She’d clung to me, crying her story out, reliving the helplessness she had felt watching everyone around her die.
She’d been courting death ever since and almost caught up with it in Algeria. She was OK now, but I didn’t know how we were. We’d fallen hard for each other, back in England. But after I pulled her out of that Vichy prison camp, drugged and half dead, I focused more on getting my revenge on the bastard responsible than on being with her. Not that she didn’t want him dead too, but once that was taken care of, I should have stepped up and let her know I still loved her. But I’d been scared, unsure of myself, and she knew it and thought the worst: that I didn’t want to be with her after all she had endured.
I’ll admit, I didn’t like thinking about it. So I tried, tried my best, and as the weeks passed, and she grew stronger, so did we. But I was never sure I had her full trust, and had no idea how to get it back.
That’s the way things had been when I left for this island voyage. We were still in love, I guess. Something was missing though, and I was man enough to understand it was something I didn’t have, but not man enough to know what it was.
Sciafani shifted his weight as he lifted his hands to put them under his arms. A rock rolled loose and started a noisy fall, dislodging gravel that flowed downhill after it, the stones hitting each other at the bottom with a sharp
click-clack
sound.We flattened ourselves even lower, not daring to look up to see if the soldiers heard.
“
Che ciò è?
” The sound of boots on gravel came scuffling across the ground, drawing closer, murmurs of cautious curiosity evident in the tone of the militiamen as they approached.
A sound like a long sheet being ripped rose in a crescendo from the sky, too fast and fierce to allow for any response. The ground shook as one shell hit, thundered, and cracked on the hill. More shrieking sounds descended, explosions that spewed earth and fire around the Italian positions. Naval gunfire, I thought. That aircraft, a spotter, had caught a glimpse of the antiaircraft gun being unloaded. Right now, sailors miles offshore were reading coordinates and loading huge shells into the cannons of a cruiser’s gun turret, while a few dozen Blackshirts were being blown to kingdom come. I pulled at Sciafani, motioning down the hill. We had to get out of here now, while we could, before a shell found us.
