by Peter Watson
But Silvio now understood the full picture, the terrible beauty of Liotta’s plan. In making the arrests on the eve of the wedding, the police not only hit Nino and Silvio; they hit at Anna-Maria and her father as well, humiliating them in public. Liotta considered this an apt revenge for the Priola family’s ruthlessness toward the Cataldos. Third, and perhaps more important in the long run, David Martell’s sensational arrests had been flashed around the country and on the strength of this, the mayor had promoted Martell from chief of detectives to chief of police. This was an extremely popular move in New Orleans, a maneuver that had proved decisive when the election took place. While Nino and Silvio were in prison, awaiting trial, Milton had been reelected.
All of this infuriated Silvio. Yet again he had been outthought by Vito Liotta. Just as in the episode with the steamboat race. Liotta’s success was more than galling. It was demeaning. Worse, it brought back those terrible moments when his parents had been killed. His life seemed to be cursed by the slowness of his brain. Sono buve? he asked himself repeatedly. Am I a dumb ox?
So he had been sullen the day Angelo and Anna-Maria arrived at the Bowery Jail to see him. They had come by train—more than a week’s journey—and were staying in New York in the very hotel where Anna-Maria and Silvio were to have spent their honeymoon.
Anna-Maria had brought Silvio the latest Mark Twain. She sympathized with Silvio’s position, but she was angry, too. She had predicted that sooner or later Silvio’s association with Nino would backfire on him. Now it had.
After a while Angelo and Nino had been allowed to walk in the prison yard and Silvio and Anna-Maria were left alone together. Anna-Maria suddenly looked nervous. For a moment Silvio thought she might want to do it, right there in his cell, but then he saw that she was too upset for that.
“Silvio,” she had said. “Silvio, I’ve got something to tell you.”
The tone of her voice was strange. Silvio was puzzled. “Well?” he said, more aggressively than he intended. “What is it?”
She looked hard at him, leaned forward, and took his hand. She was wearing a blue dress that hid her figure and almost no makeup. “Madeleine’s been killed.”
He jerked his hand away. “No! What do you mean, killed? Murdered?”
She nodded, distraught that he should still care so much. “I’m sorry, Silvio. I’m really very sorry.”
He glared at her. He couldn’t forget what Anna-Maria had done to Madeleine, but here in this cell she did seem genuinely upset.
He felt like crying, but couldn’t. Too much was still happening too quickly. “Tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me. How?”
Anna-Maria spoke in scarcely more than a whisper. “She went to a quadroon ball—”
Silvio groaned. He had arranged that.
“She was a great success, Silvio. Scores of men asked her to dance. She was invited onto the terrace by several men, and accepted. One time while she was outside she was stabbed. Her body was found the next morning.”
Silvio had begun to sweat. “Why? Why? Some sex maniac?”
Anna-Maria shook her head. “Apparently not. And Father doesn’t believe so, either. He … he knew about you and Madeleine….” It clearly pained Anna-Maria to say this. “He looked into Madeleine’s death. It seems two other girls were killed around that time, too. Two other”—she said the next word softly—“whores.”
She paused, to let Silvio take in what she was saying. “Father thinks that Madeleine was killed for what she knew. The other girls were friends of David Martell.” Anna-Maria was trying to be gentle but looked hard at Silvio. “Did Madeleine ever say anything to you, Silvio, about Martell and Liotta? Father told me to ask you.”
Instinctively Silvio shook his head. He couldn’t admit now what he had not admitted before. But he saw it all quite clearly. Liotta had suddenly discovered—from one of the other girls?—that there was a chance Madeleine knew that Liotta had set up Nino and Silvio with Martell, that a Sicilian had gone outside omertà, and as such would forfeit all respect throughout the New Orleans malavita. So he’d had to kill the evidence.
Slumped in his cell, Silvio felt his anger boil up again. Liotta would be made to pay, once this trial was out of the way. But in front of Anna-Maria he forced himself to be calm.
“What about Madeleine’s son?” he asked. “Who’s looking after him?”
“Stella. Don’t worry, she’s a good mother.”
Anna-Maria and he had parted tenderly after that. She had handled herself well in giving him the news, and he had responded. If the trial went well and he was not extradited, he told her, he would be home in no time and they could be married just as soon as it could be rearranged. He kissed her on the cheek.
It took him days to adjust to the news about Madeleine. When he was allowed outside into the exercise yard, he would hurl stones violently at the wall. As time went by, however, he found himself more obsessed with Vito Liotta. Vito had to be dealt with. This fox had to be killed.
Silvio turned his attention back to the court. Today was the first day of the closing speeches. The prosecution would sum up its case today, the defense tomorrow. The judge would add his concluding remarks the day after. Silvio was looking forward to it. He believed they had a good chance of winning their fight to remain in America.
The clerk of the court appeared. “All rise,” he said. “Judge Proctor presiding.”
The judge, a tall, lean, spare man, strode swiftly to his seat and sat down. He nodded to the prosecuting attorney. “Mr. Routledge.”
Routledge stood up. With his bull neck he looked more like a docker than a lawyer, but Silvio knew he had an able mind.
“Your Honor, something most unusual has occurred and I crave the court’s indulgence. It is very important and I think I can convince you why a short alteration in procedure would be in order. May I approach the bench?”
Proctor nodded, and also beckoned forward the defense attorney, Frank Weston, the lawyer Angelo had found. For a few moments there was a whispered conversation between the three of them, which grew heated as the minutes passed. Then Proctor raised his hand. “No, that’s enough, Mr. Weston. I’ll allow it.”
Routledge returned to his seat smiling. Weston came back to his scowling.
“What is it?” whispered Nino, but Weston motioned for him to be quiet.
Routledge stood. “Before my concluding remarks for the state, let the record show that I call one extra witness, according to the procedural alteration His Honor has just allowed.” He hesitated, for effect. “The state calls Henry Livesey.”
Silvio wasn’t sure at first who this Henry Livesey was—until he noticed Nino go white with horror and mutter through clenched teeth, “The priest! The English priest!”
Of course! The man Nino had scalped. Silvio felt sick.
There was a rustle of noise as the public strained to see the new witness.
A tall, thin man in a priest’s black cassock entered the court. There was a brief flash of white at his throat—his dog collar.
A priest giving evidence. This was bad. The court would have to believe him. But it had been more than two years since the episode in Sicily. Would he still remember Nino?
Livesey took the stand and read the oath.
Then Routledge said, “The court is grateful to you for coming all this way, Father Livesey.”
The priest nodded. “I would have been here earlier, but the ship I was traveling on encountered bad weather and lost one of her engines.”
“No matter. You are here now. Will you please tell the court about certain events which took place, in Sicily, in 1879?”
And for fifteen minutes Livesey gave what was obviously a well-rehearsed account of his kidnapping by Nino. Everyone was fascinated. When he described how his scalp had been sliced off and mailed to London, there was utter silence in the court.
“I apologize for doing this, Father Livesey, but so that everyone can judge for himself the barbarity of the crime that was perp
etrated on you, could you please bow your head so that we may all see your scalp—or what is left of it.”
Livesey leaned forward in the chair so that the top of his head could be seen by every member of the jury. Hair was growing again but haphazardly and thinly. The flat top to his skull could be plainly seen, like a slice taken out of an apple.
After a moment a long moment in which all eyes were on Livesey and his disfigurement, Routledge said, “And now, Father Livesey, let us come to the reason we have brought you all this way, three thousand five hundred miles from London. Can you please tell the court if the man who performed this barbarous operation on you is in this room today? If he is, can you please point to him?”
This was the test. If Livesey fingered Nino, they were done for. The flat skull, the priest’s outfit, the three and a half thousand miles traveled to give evidence: it was a powerful combination that no amount of false witness, however convincing, could overcome.
Livesey looked across to the table where Nino and Silvio were seated. His eyes fastened onto Nino’s. They narrowed in hatred and contempt. “That’s him,” he said, pointing. “That’s Nino Greco, the Quarryman.”
PART THREE
Sottocapo
1887
15
“You have a visitor, Randazzo. Come on, get up!” The guard opened the door to Silvio’s cell and pulled him roughly off his bunk.
Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be led outside. Ucciardone Prison, on the edge of Palermo, was every bit as bad as the Parish Prison in New Orleans, maybe worse. Silvio was required to work eight backbreaking hours a day quarrying fine marble. When he returned to his cell he was allowed half an hour’s rest before the evening shower and the filth they called dinner. Now some stupid visitor had disturbed his thirty minutes of peace.
He would soon have spent four years in this one cell. Four years with just a bed, a crucifix, and Mark Twain for company. The regime at Ucciardone was hard, and so were the other men, prisoners, and guards. There were no friendships in this jail; instead, there was brutality everywhere. The guards had whips and enforced their authority with a lashing at the slightest provocation. Prisoners would betray each other for the smallest reason, the most meager privileges handed out by the governor.
Silvio, it was true, had been left pretty much to himself, on account of his links to Nino. After four years even that was beginning to fade.
Once the English priest had given evidence against them in the New York court, Nino and Silvio had lost their fight to stay in America and had been put aboard an Italian naval frigate in New York Harbor, which had left American waters even before an appeal against extradition could be lodged. They were manacled for the whole voyage, kept in the bowels of the ship, and hadn’t been allowed to see daylight even once. They had been unloaded at Palermo and removed to the Girganti Prison in the center of town, to await trial on charges brought by the Italian authorities. That had taken place late in 1882. Nino had been found guilty of thirteen murders—two in the Palermo docks in 1866, eleven in the Dragonaro quarry in 1879—and of the kidnapping and assault of Father Henry Livesey, who had proved himself an indefatigable traveler and witness, arriving in Palermo to give evidence, just as he had in New York. Nino had received twenty years for the murders, ten for the mutilation of Livesey, and five for the kidnapping, the sentences to run consecutively, thirty-five years in total. He would be seventy-five before he came out. If he lived.
For his part in the kidnapping, Silvio, as a minor, was sentenced to two years. For his part in the massacre of the Lazio Brigade soldiers, he, too, received twenty years’ hard labor. As with Nino, the sentences were to run consecutively. He would be forty-three, an old man, before he was released. Liotta’s plan had worked. He had gotten rid of Nino and Silvio in one bold stroke.
Silvio hadn’t seen Nino since the Palermo trial. Because the Quarryman was such a notorious figure in Sicily, still something of a symbol for many people, the authorities in Rome had judged that attempts might be made to free him. They therefore removed him to the north of Italy, to a prison near Bologna, where, they felt, he was far more secure and where his fame, or notoriety, counted for much less.
Silvio had been allowed to stay in Sicily, on the humanitarian grounds that he was only a young man and should be near his family. His only family, of course, was Bastiano and Smeralda. Smeralda came occasionally, but Bastiano had been part of the attack on the Lazio Brigade, was now the Don of Bivona and himself much sought after by the authorities. So he could hardly walk into a prison of his own free will. Smeralda usually came on Sundays, but today was Friday. Why the change in routine?
Not that Silvio cared especially. When he had first entered prison he had been angry, angry at the Americans for arresting him and smuggling him aboard the City of New Orleans, angry at himself for allowing it to happen, angry at his friends in America for not having prevented the English priest from giving evidence, angry at Nino for his explosive nature that had helped land him where he was. He was also angry with Anna-Maria—for being right. He should have separated himself from Nino while he had the chance. Most of all, he was angry with Vito Liotta, for making all this happen, and for being so fucking clever.
There had been no word from Anna-Maria, but he had heard that she had waited until he was sentenced—and then married Dick Saltram, the ice maker. Silvio couldn’t blame her. She wasn’t about to wait for twenty-two years to marry him.
Angelo, of course, had gotten word through, bless him. If Silvio had had dependents, Priola would have looked after them, but not even Angie could spirit Silvio out of Ucciardone Prison from four thousand miles away. Angelo would come to terms with Liotta, of course; he had to. Probably he already had. He wouldn’t necessarily take revenge, not if he judged that a lasting peace was now possible—with two Dons in New Orleans. No one could make war all the time.
It had taken months for Silvio’s anger to work itself through. Then he had become depressed. When he wasn’t laboring in the quarry, his thoughts alternated between dreams of freedom—the bars and brothels and gambling joints of New Orleans, the busy, bustling life on the Mississippi, the vast open skies of Louisiana—and the reality that he would be in prison, between these four walls, with no Madeleine, no bourbon, no absinthe, no blocks of ice with flowers in them, for the next God knew how many years. Sono cadavere, he repeated to himself time and again. I’m a corpse, a living corpse. His time in Ucciardone stretched ahead of him as far as his own life stretched back, all the way until he was a baby. He had no mother, no father, no wife, no children. He had no one to blame but himself, his own stupidity. He felt very sorry for himself, became listless, would sometimes weep silently at night, when there was no one else to see. The guards had looked upon his listlessness with contempt, and vowed to whip him out of it.
Then he met Carmelo Giaccone, the prison doctor, who had stopped by Silvio’s cell one evening and dropped off a book. He must have noticed the Mark Twain, Anna-Maria’s gift that Silvio kept with him, to read and reread. Few prisoners were literate. “Read that,” Giaccone had said. “It might help.” He was a tall man with long fingers, surgeon’s hands. He smoked small cigars.
Silvio had said nothing at the time, just lain on his bed as usual. But he wasn’t indifferent to the doctor or his gesture. Whether it was because Giaccone was an educated man, or because his gift was the first time anyone in years had done anything for Silvio, he picked up the book.
It was an Italian translation of a Russian book, a story about a man who had committed several crimes and gotten away with them, but was then accused of something he hadn’t done and imprisoned for it. Silvio wasn’t a fast reader. He had not been able to read at all before he went to America, and there he had read more in English than in Italian. So it took him two weeks to finish the book. Next time the doctor came, he said, “I finished the book. How was it supposed to help?”
Dr. Giaccone looked at him. “You finished it. That’s the first positive thing you’ve
done in months. While you were reading it you weren’t feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Is that important?”
“Look, I know prison’s not New Orleans, or the Via Scina, or the almond orchards of Indisi, but you’re still a young man, Randazzo, and smart. The way you’ve been going, you won’t see thirty. Believe me, I know.”
“And one book changes all that?”
“Not one book, no. But it’s a start. I gave you that book, not because it has any great message, or because it’s beautifully written, but because it was about prison, about someone who felt as angry as you. So I knew you’d read it, and finish it.”
“So. I finished it?”
“Want another?”
To his surprise, Silvio realized he did want to read another book. Giaccone brought him an American story by someone called Edgar Allan Poe, about a man who was cast adrift on a becalmed sea—and this time Silvio read it in less than a week. The doctor brought other books, and gradually Silvio found he looked forward to the evenings when he got back from the quarry and could lie on his bed and escape into a world beyond the prison bars. The books weren’t always stories. Sometimes they were about history, painting, voyages, science. They brought back those afternoons on the lugger with Anna-Maria.
Sometimes the doctor came in on Sundays and they would discuss what they had both been reading. Silvio came to enjoy these discussions almost as much as he enjoyed the books themselves. Often the doctor saw things in the books that Silvio had missed entirely. As the saying went, some people’s taste was for olives, others’ for almonds.
One Sunday, when Silvio had been in jail nearly three years, the doctor had said, “How would you like to help me in the surgery?”
At first Silvio was alarmed. He was reminded all too forcefully of Dr. Tolmezzo on the Syracusa.
“You were sentenced to hard labor,” said Giaccone. “I can’t change that. But on Sunday mornings, when you don’t go to the quarry, I perform minor operations on prisoners who are ill or have been injured. I need an assistant, and the man who’s been helping me has just been released.”