Omerta

by Mario Puzo

  But there is another definition of a great man. Primarily that he does not accept that burden. In some way, criminal, immoral, or by sheer cunning, he will ride the crest of that wave of human progress without sacrifice.

  Don Raymonde Aprile was such a man. He generated his own individual power by his intelligence and by his complete lack of mercy. He generated fear; he became a legend. But his children, when they were grown, never believed in the most atrocious stories.

  There was the legend of the beginning of his rule as Family chief. The Don controlled a construction company run by a subordinate, Tommy Liotti, whom the Don had made rich at an early age with city building contracts. The man was handsome, witty, a thorough charmer, and the Don always enjoyed his company. He had only one fault: He drank to excess.

  Tommy married the Don’s wife’s best friend, Liza, an old-fashioned handsome woman with a sharp tongue, who felt it her duty to curb her husband’s obvious pleasure with himself. This led to some unfortunate incidents. He accepted her barbs well enough when he was sober, but when drunk he would slap her face hard enough to make her bite her tongue.

  It was also unfortunate that the husband had a massive strength, due to working hard and long on construction sites during his youth. Indeed, he always wore short-sleeved shirts to display his magnificent forearms and his great biceps.

  Sadly, the incidents escalated over a period of two years. One night Tommy broke Liza’s nose and knocked out a few teeth, which required expensive surgical repair. The woman did not dare ask Don Aprile’s wife for protection, since such a request would probably make her a widow, and she still loved her husband.

  It was not Don Aprile’s desire to interfere in the domestic squabbles of his underlings. Such things could never be solved. If the husband had killed the wife, he would not have been concerned. But the beatings posed a danger to his business relationship. An enraged wife could make certain testimonies, give damaging information. For the husband kept large quantities of cash in his house for those incidental bribes so necessary to the fulfillment of city contracts.

  So Don Aprile summoned the husband. With the utmost courtesy, he made it plain he interfered in the man’s personal life only because it affected business. He advised the man to kill his wife outright or divorce her or never to ill-treat her further. The husband assured him it would never happen again. But the Don was mistrustful. He had noticed that certain gleam in the man’s eyes, the gleam of free will. He considered this one of the great mysteries of life, that a man will do what he feels like doing with no regard to the cost. Great men have allied themselves with the angels at a terrible price to themselves. Evil men indulge their slightest whim for small satisfactions while accepting the fate of burning in Hell.

  And so it turned out with Tommy Liotti. It took nearly a year, and Liza’s tongue grew sharper with her husband’s indulgence. Despite the warning from the Don, despite his love for his children and his wife, Tommy beat her in the most violent fashion. She ended up in the hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung.

  With his wealth and political connections, Tommy bought one of the Don’s corrupt judges with an enormous bribe. Then he talked his wife into coming back to him.

  Don Aprile observed this with some anger and regretfully took charge of the affair. First, he attended to the practical aspects of the matter. He obtained a copy of the husband’s will and learned that like a good family man, he had left all his worldly goods to his wife and children. She would be a rich widow. Then he sent out a special team with specific instructions. Within the week the judge received a long box wrapped in ribbons, and in it, like a pair of expensive long silk gloves, were the two massive forearms of the husband, one wearing on its wrist the expensive Rolex watch the Don had given him years before as a token of his esteem. The next day the rest of the body was found floating in the water around the Verrazano Bridge.

  Another legend was chilling because of its ambiguity, like some childish ghost story. While the Don’s three children were attending boarding school, an enterprising and talented journalist noted for his witty exposure of the frailties of famous people tracked them down and enticed them into what seemed like harmless verbal exchange. The writer had great fun with their innocence, their preppy clothes, their juvenile idealism about how to make a better world. The journalist contrasted it with their father’s reputation while admitting that Don Aprile had never actually been convicted of a crime.

  The piece became famous, circulated in newsrooms throughout the country even before publication. It was the kind of success a writer dreams about. Everybody loved it.

  The journalist was a nature lover, and every year he took his wife and two children to a cabin in upstate New York for hunting and fishing and living simply. They were there one long Thanksgiving weekend. On Saturday the cabin, ten miles from the nearest town, caught fire. There was no rescue for about two hours. By then the house had burned to smoking logs and the journalist and his family were merely charred and brittle sticks. There was an enormous outcry and a massive investigation, but no evidence of foul play could be found. The conclusion was that the family had been overcome by smoke before they could escape.

  Then a curious thing happened. A few months after the tragedy, whispers and rumors began to circulate. Anonymous tips came in to the FBI, the police, the press. They all suggested that the fire was an act of vengeance by the infamous Don Aprile. The press, hot for a story, clamored for the case to be reopened. It was, but again there was no indictment. Yet, despite any proof, this became another legend of the Don’s ferocity.

  But that was the general public; the authorities were satisfied, in this instance, that the Don was beyond reproach. Everybody knew journalists were exempt from any retaliation. You would have to kill thousands, so what was the point? The Don was too intelligent to take such a risk. Still, the legend never died. Some FBI teams even thought the Don himself had inspired the rumors to fulfill his legend. And so it grew.

  But there was another side to the Don: his generosity. If you served him loyally, you became rich and had a formidable protector in times of travail. The rewards given by the Don were enormous but the punishments final. That was his legend.

  After his meetings with Portella and Cilke, Don Aprile had details to tidy up. He set in motion the machinery to bring Astorre Viola back home after his eleven-year exile.

  He needed Astorre, indeed had prepared him for this moment. Astorre was the Don’s favorite, even above his own children. As a child Astorre was always a leader, precocious in his sociability. He loved the Don, and he did not fear him as his own children sometimes did. And though Valerius and Marcantonio were twenty and eighteen years old, when Astorre was ten, he established his independence from them. Indeed, when Valerius, somewhat of a military martinet, tried to chastise him, he fought back. Marcantonio was much more affectionate to him and bought him his first banjo to encourage his singing. Astorre accepted this as the courtesy of one adult to another.

  The only one Astorre took orders from was Nicole. And though she was two years older, she treated him as a suitor, as he demanded even as a small boy. She made him run her errands and listened soulfully to the Italian ballads he sang her. And she slapped his face when he tried to kiss her. For even as a small boy, Astorre was enraptured by feminine beauty.

  And Nicole was beautiful. She had large dark eyes and a sensual smile; her face revealed every emotion she felt. She challenged anyone who tried to insinuate that as a female she was not as important as any man in her world. She hated the fact that she was not as physically strong as her brothers and Astorre, that she could not assert her will by force but only by her beauty. All this made her absolutely fearless, and she taunted them all, even her father, despite his dread reputation.

  After his wife’s death, when the children were still young, Don Aprile made it a practice to spend one summer month in Sicily. He loved the life in his native village, near the town of Montelepre, and he still owned property there,
a house that had been the country retreat of a count, called Villa Grazia.

  After a few years he hired a housekeeper, a Sicilian widow named Caterina. She was a very handsome woman, strong with a rich peasant beauty and a keen sense of how to run a property and command respect from the villagers. She became his mistress. All of this he kept secret from his family and friends, though now he was a man of forty and a king in his world.

  Astorre Viola was only ten years old the first time he accompanied Don Raymonde Aprile to Sicily. The Don had been requested to mediate a great conflict between the Corleonesi cosca and the Clericuzio cosca. And it was also his pleasure to spend a quiet month of tranquillity at Villa Grazia.

  Astorre, at ten, was affable—there was no other word. He was always cheerful, and his handsome round face with its olive skin radiated love. He continually sang in a sweet tenor voice. And when he was not singing, he offered lively conversation. Yet he had the fiery qualities of a born rebel, and he terrorized the other boys his age.

  The Don brought him to Sicily because he was the best of company for a middle-aged man, which was a curious commentary on both, as well as a reflection on how the Don had brought up his own three children.

  Once the Don settled his business affairs, he mediated the dispute and brought about temporary peace. Now he enjoyed his days reliving his childhood in his native village. He ate lemons, oranges, and olives from their briny barrels, and he took long walks with Astorre under the sullen deadly light of the Sicilian sun that reflected all the stone houses and countless rocks with a stunning heat. He told the small boy long-ago stories of the Robin Hoods of Sicily, their fights against the Moors, the French, the Spaniards, the pope himself. And tales of a local hero, the Great Don Zeno.

  At night, together on the terrace of the Villa Grazia, they watched the azure sky of Sicily lit with a thousand shooting stars and the flashes of lightning hurling through the mountains just a short distance away. Astorre picked up the Sicilian dialect immediately and ate the black olives from the barrel as if they were bits of candy.

  In just a few days Astorre established his leadership in a gang of young village boys. It was a wonder to the Don that he could do so, for Sicilian children were full of pride and feared no one. Many of these ten-year-old cherubs were already familiar with the lupara, the ever-present Sicilian shotgun.

  Don Aprile, Astorre, and Caterina spent long summer nights eating and drinking alfresco in the luxuriant garden, the orange and lemon trees saturating the air with their citrus perfume. Sometimes old boyhood friends of the Don were invited to dinner and a game of cards. Astorre helped Caterina serve them drinks.

  Caterina and the Don never showed public signs of affection, but all was understood in the village, so no man dared to present any gallantries to Caterina and all showed her the respect the female head of the house was due. No time in his life was more pleasant to the Don.

  It was just three days before the end of the visit that the unimaginable happened: The Don was kidnapped while walking the streets of the village.

  In the neighboring province of Cinesi, one of the most remote and undeveloped in Sicily, the head of the village cosca, the local Mafioso, was a ferocious, fearless bandit by the name of Fissolini. Absolute in his local power, he really had no communication with the rest of the Mafia coscas on the island. He knew nothing of Don Aprile’s enormous power, nor did he think it could penetrate his own remote and secure world. He decided to kidnap the Don and hold him for ransom. The only rule he knew he was breaking was that he was encroaching onto the territory of the neighboring cosca, but the American seemed a rich enough prize to warrant the risk.

  The cosca is the basic unit of what is called the Mafia and is usually composed of blood relatives. Law-abiding citizens such as lawyers or doctors attach themselves to a cosca for protection of their interests. Each cosca is an organization in and of itself but may ally itself to a stronger and more powerful one. It is this interlinking that is commonly called the Mafia. But there is no overall chief or commander.

  A cosca usually majors in a particular racket in its particular territory. There is the cosca that controls the price of water and prevents the central government from building dams to lower the price. In that way it destroys the government’s monopoly. Another cosca will control the food and produce markets. The most powerful ones in Sicily at this time were the Clericuzio cosca of Palermo, which controlled the new construction in all of Sicily, and the Corleonesi cosca of Corleone, which controlled the politicians in Rome and engineered the transportation of drugs all over the world. Then there were the piddling coscas who demanded tribute from romantic youths to sing to the balconies of their beloveds. All coscas regulated crime. They would not tolerate lazy good-for-nothings burglarizing innocent citizens who paid their cosca dues. Those who stabbed for wallets or raped women were summarily punished by death. Also, there was no tolerance of adultery within the coscas. Both men and women were executed. That was understood.

  Fissolini’s cosca made a poor living. It controlled the sale of holy icons, was paid to protect a farmer’s livestock, and organized the kidnapping of careless wealthy men.

  And so it was that Don Aprile and little Astorre, strolling along the streets of their village, were picked up in two vintage American army trucks by the ignorant Fissolini and his band of men.

  The ten men in peasant clothes were armed with rifles. They plucked Don Aprile off the ground and threw him into the first truck. Astorre, without hesitation, jumped into the open bed of the truck to stay with the Don. The bandits tried to throw him out, but he clung to the wooden posts. The trucks traveled an hour to the base of the mountains around Montelepre. Then everyone switched to horseback and donkey and climbed the rocky terraces toward the horizon. Throughout the trip, the boy observed everything with large green eyes but never spoke a word.

  Near sunset, they reached a cave set deep in the mountains. There they were fed a supper of grilled lamb and homemade bread and wine. On the campsite was a huge statue of the Virgin Mary enclosed in a hand-carved dark wooden shrine. Fissolini was devout in spite of his ferocity. He also had a natural peasant courtesy and presented himself to the Don and the boy. There was no doubt he was chief of the band. He was short and built powerfully as a gorilla, and he carried a rifle and two guns on his body belt. His face was as stony as Sicily, but there was a merry twinkle in his eyes. He enjoyed life and its little jokes, especially that he held in his power a rich American worth his weight in gold. And yet there was no malice in him.

  “Excellency,” he said to the Don, “I don’t want you to worry about this young lad. He will carry the ransom note to town tomorrow morning.”

  Astorre was eating lustily. He had never tasted anything so delicious as this grilled lamb. But he finally spoke up with cheerful bravery. “I’m staying with my Uncle Raymonde,” he said.

  Fissolini laughed. “Good food gives courage. To show my respect for His Excellency I prepared this meal myself. I used my mother’s special spices.”

  “I’m staying with my uncle,” Astorre said, and his voice rang out clear, defiant.

  Don Aprile said to Fissolini sternly yet kindly, “It’s been a wonderful night—the food, the mountain air, your company. I look forward to the fresh dew in the country. But then I advise you to bring me back to my village.”

  Fissolini bowed to him respectfully. “I know that you are rich. But are you that powerful? I am only going to ask for one hundred thousand dollars in American money.”

  “That insults me,” the Don said. “You will injure my reputation. Double it. And another fifty for the boy. It will be paid. But then your life will be an eternal misery.” He paused for a moment. “I’m astonished you could be so rash.”

  Fissolini sighed. “You must understand, Excellency, I am a poor man. Certainly I can take what I want in my province, but Sicily is such a cursed country that the rich are too poor to support men like myself. You must understand that you are the chance to make my
fortune.”

  “Then you should have come to me to offer your services,” the Don said. “I always have use for a talented man.”

  “You say that now because you are weak and helpless,” Fissolini said. “The weak are always so generous. But I will follow your advice and ask double. Though I feel a little guilty about that. No human is worth so much. And I will let the boy go free. I have a weakness for children—I have four of my own whose mouths I must feed.”

  Don Aprile looked at Astorre. “Will you go?”

  “No,” Astorre said, lowering his head. “I want to be with you.” He raised his eyes and looked at his uncle.

  “Then let him stay,” the Don said to the bandit.

  Fissolini shook his head. “He goes back. I have a reputation to keep. I will not be known as a kidnapper of children. Because after all, Your Excellency, though I have the utmost respect, I will have to send you back piece by piece if they do not pay. But if they do, I give you the word of honor of Pietro Fissolini, not a hair of your mustache will be touched.”

  “The money will be paid,” the Don said calmly. “And now let us make the best of things. Nephew, sing one of your songs for these gentlemen.”

  Astorre sang to the bandits, who were enchanted and complimented him, ruffling his hair affectionately. Indeed it was a magical moment for all of them, the child’s sweet voice filling the mountains with songs of love.

  Blankets and sleeping bags were brought out of a nearby cave.

  Fissolini said, “Your Excellency, what would you like for breakfast tomorrow? Some fish, fresh from the water perhaps? Then some spaghetti and veal for lunch? We are at your service.”