The Sicilian

by Mario Puzo

  The guards carrying Pisciotta rushed into the pharmacy shouting that the prisoner had been poisoned. Cuto made them lay Pisciotta on one of the beds in the alcove and examined him. Then he quickly prepared an emetic and poured it down Pisciotta’s throat. To the guards he seemed to be doing everything to save Pisciotta. Only Hector Adonis knew that the emetic was a weak solution that would not help the dying man. Adonis moved to the side of the bed and took the slip of paper in his breast pocket, holding it concealed in the palm of his hand. With the pretense of helping the pharmacist, he slipped the paper inside Pisciotta’s shirt. At the same time he looked down at Pisciotta’s handsome face. It seemed to be contorted with grief, but Adonis knew it was the contraction of terrible pain. Part of the tiny mustache had been gnawed away in his agony. Hector Adonis at that moment said a prayer for his soul and felt a great sadness. He remembered when this man and his godson had walked arm in arm over the hills of Sicily reciting the poetry of Roland and Charlemagne.

  It was almost six hours later that the note was found on the body, but that was still early enough for it to be included in the newspaper stories of Pisciotta’s death and quoted all over Sicily. The piece of paper Hector Adonis had slipped inside Aspanu’s shirt read SO DIE ALL WHO BETRAY GUILIANO.

  CHAPTER 31

  IN SICILY, IF you have any money at all, you do not put your loved ones into the ground. That is too final a defeat, and the earth of Sicily has already been responsible for too many indignities. So the cemeteries are filled with little stone and marble mausoleums—square tiny buildings called congregazioni. Iron grill doors bar their entrances. Inside are tiers in which coffins are put and then that particular tier is sealed with cement. The other tiers are reserved for family use.

  Hector Adonis chose a fine Sunday shortly after Pisciotta’s death to visit the Montelepre Cemetery. Don Croce was to meet him there to pray at the grave of Turi Guiliano. And since they had business to discuss, what better place for the meeting of the minds without vanity, for forgiveness of past injuries, for discretion?

  And what better place to congratulate a colleague for a job well done? It had been Don Croce’s duty to eliminate Pisciotta, who was too eloquent and had too good a memory. He had chosen Hector Adonis to mastermind the job. The note left on the body was one of the Don’s most subtle gestures. It satisfied Adonis, and a political murder was disguised as an act of romantic justice. In front of the cemetery gates, Hector Adonis watched as the chauffeur and bodyguards lifted Don Croce out of his car. The Don’s girth had increased enormously in the last year, his body seeming to grow with the immense power he had accrued.

  The two men passed through the gate together. Adonis looked up at the curved archway. On the wrought-iron frame the metal was twisted to spell out a message for complacent mourners. It read: WE HAVE BEEN LIKE YOU—AND YOU SHALL BE LIKE US.

  Adonis smiled at the sardonic challenge. Guiliano would never be guilty of such cruelty, but it was exactly what Aspanu Pisciotta would shout from his grave.

  Hector Adonis no longer felt the bitter hatred of Pisciotta that he had carried with him after Guiliano’s death. He had taken his revenge. Now he thought of the two of them playing as children, becoming outlaws together.

  Don Croce and Hector Adonis were deep in the sepulchral village of small stones and marble buildings. Don Croce and his bodyguards moved in a group, supporting each other on the rocky path; the driver carried a huge bouquet of flowers which he put on the gate of the congregazione that held Guiliano’s body. Don Croce fussily rearranged the flowers, then peered at the small photograph of Guiliano pasted on the stone door. His bodyguards clung to the trunk of his body to keep him from falling.

  Don Croce straightened up. “He was a brave lad,” the Don said. “We all loved Turi Guiliano. But how could we live with him? He wanted to change the world, turn it upside down. He loved his fellow man and who killed more of them? He believed in God and kidnapped a Cardinal.”

  Hector Adonis studied the photograph. It had been taken when Guiliano was only seventeen, the height of beauty by the Mediterranean Sea. There was a sweetness in his face that made you love him, and you could never dream that he would order a thousand murders, send a thousand souls to hell.

  Ah, Sicily, Sicily, he thought, you destroy your best and bring them to dust. Children more beautiful than the angels spring from your earth and turn into demons. The evil flourish in this soil like the bamboo and the prickly pear. And yet why was Don Croce here to lay flowers at Guiliano’s grave?

  “Ah,” said the Don, “if only I had a son like Turi Guiliano. What an empire I could leave for him to rule. Who knows what glories he would win?”

  Hector Adonis smiled. No doubt Don Croce was a great man, but he had no perception of history. Don Croce had a thousand sons who would carry on his rule, inherit his cunning, pillage Sicily, corrupt Rome. And he, Hector Adonis, Eminent Professor of History and Literature at Palermo University, was one of them.

  Hector Adonis and Don Croce turned to leave. A long line of carts was waiting in front of the cemetery. Every inch of them was painted in bright colors with the legends of Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta: the robbing of the Duchess, the great slaughter of the Mafia chiefs, the murder of Turi by Aspanu. And it seemed to Hector Adonis that he knew all things. That Don Croce would be forgotten despite his greatness, and that it was Turi Guiliano who would live on. That Guiliano’s legend would grow, that some would believe he never died but still roamed the Cammarata Mountains and on some great day would reappear to lift Sicily out of its chains and misery. In thousands of stone- and dirt-filled villages, children yet unborn would pray for Guiliano’s soul and resurrection.

  And Aspanu Pisciotta with his subtle mind, who was to say he had not listened when Hector Adonis had recited the legends of Charlemagne and Roland and Oliver and so decided to go another way? By remaining faithful, Pisciotta would have been forgotten, Guiliano would fill the legend alone. But by committing his great crime, he would stand alongside his beloved Turi forever.

  Pisciotta would be buried in this same cemetery. The two of them would gaze forever at their cherished mountains, those same mountains that held the skeleton of Hannibal’s elephant, that once echoed with the great blasts of Roland’s horn when he died fighting the Saracens. Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta had died young, but they would live, if not forever, certainly longer than Don Croce or himself, Professor Hector Adonis.

  The two men, one so huge, one so tiny, left the cemetery together. Terraced gardens girdled the sides of the surrounding mountains with green ribbons, great white rocks gleamed, a tiny red hawk of Sicily rode down toward them on a shaft of sunlight.

  Praise for Mario Puzo

  and his final novel Omerta

  “[A] deft and passionate last novel.”

  —Time

  “A splendid piece of crime fiction . . . A fitting cap to a tremendous career . . . Through it all, Puzo keeps the heat on and keeps the reader enthralled with his characters and his story.”

  —The Denver Post

  “In Omerta (the Sicilian code for silence), Puzo cements his reputation as a page-turning storyteller.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A seriously guilty pleasure . . . As with The Godfather, the reader gets sucked into the plot immediately.”

  —The New York Post

  “Puzo suffuses the novel with many of the ingredients his readers crave, tantalizingly documenting the lavish lifestyles and sexual exploits of his hot-blooded characters.”

  —The Miami Herald

  Mario Puzo on

  The Godfather

  I was ready to forget novels except maybe as a puttering hobby for my old age. But one day a writer friend dropped into my magazine office. As a natural courtesy, I gave him a copy of The Fortunate Pilgrim. A week later he came back. He thought I was a great writer. I bought him a magnificent lunch. During lunch, I told him some funny Mafia stories and my ten-page outline. He was enthusiastic. He ar
ranged a meeting for me with the editor of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The editors just sat around for an hour listening to my Mafia tales and said go ahead. They also gave me a $5,000 advance and I was on my way, just like that. Almost—almost, I believed that publishers were human.

  It took me three years to finish...And it was mostly all fun. I remember it as the happiest time of my life. (Family and friends disagree.) I’m ashamed to admit I wrote The Godfather entirely from research. I never met a real honest-to-god gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good, but that’s all. After the book became “famous,” I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They were flattering. They refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets. They refused to believe that I had never had the confidence of a Don. But all of them loved the book.

  In different parts of the country I heard a nice story: that the Mafia had paid me a million dollars to write The Godfather as a public relations con. I’m not in the literary world much, but I hear some writers claim I must have been a Mafia man, that the book could not have been written purely out of research. I treasure the compliment.

  —Mario Puzo, The Godfather Papers, 1972

  Also By Mario Puzo

  Fiction:

  THE DARK ARENA*

  THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM*

  THE GODFATHER

  FOOLS DIE

  THE SICILIAN*

  THE FOURTH K*

  THE LAST DON*

  OMERTA*

  THE FAMILY

  THE GODFATHER RETURNS*

  Nonfiction:

  THE GODFATHER PAPERS

  INSIDE LAS VEGAS

  Children’s Book:

  THE RUNAWAY SUMMER OF DAVIE SHAW

  *Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1984 by Mario Puzo

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, New York, in 1984.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-48074-3

  v3.0