by Mario Puzo
“I thank you,” the Don said. “A bit of cheese and fruit will be enough.”
“Sleep well,” Fissolini said. He was softened by the boy’s look of unhappiness, and he patted Astorre on the head. “Tomorrow you will rest in your own bed.”
Astorre closed his eyes to fall asleep immediately on the ground next to the Don. “Stay beside me,” the Don said, as he reached his arms around the boy.
Astorre slept so soundly that the rising cinder-red sun was over his head when a clatter awoke him. He rose and saw that the hollow was filled with fifty armed men. Don Aprile, gentle, calm, and dignified, was sitting on a great ledge of stone, sipping from a mug of coffee.
Don Aprile saw Astorre and beckoned to him. “Astorre, do you want some coffee?” He pointed a finger at the man before him. “This is my good friend, Bianco. He has rescued us.”
Astorre saw a huge man who, though he was well encased in fat, wore a suit and tie, and seemed to be unarmed, was far more frightening than Fissolini. He had a curly head of white hair and large pink eyes, and he radiated power. But he seemed to blanket that power when he spoke with a soft, gravelly voice.
Octavius Bianco said, “Don Aprile, I must apologize for being so late and that you had to sleep like a peasant on the ground. But I came as soon as I got the news. I always knew Fissolini was a dunce, but I never expected him to do this.”
There began the sound of hammering, and some men moved out of Astorre’s vision. He saw two young boys, nailing together a cross. Then, lying on the far side of the hollow, he saw Fissolini and his ten bandits trussed on the ground and tethered to trees. They were encased by a web of wire and rope, their limbs entwined. They looked like a mound of flies on a lump of meat.
Bianco asked, “Don Aprile, which of these scum do you wish to judge first?”
“Fissolini,” the Don said. “He is the leader.”
Bianco dragged Fissolini before the Don; he was still tightly bound, like a mummy. Bianco and one of his soldiers lifted him and forced him to stand. Then Bianco said, “Fissolini, how could you be so stupid? Didn’t you know the Don was under my protection or I would have kidnapped him myself? Did you think you were just borrowing a flask of oil? Some vinegar? Have I ever entered your province? But you were always headstrong, and I knew you would come to grief. Well, since like Jesus you must hang from the cross, make your apologies to Don Aprile and his little boy. And I will give you mercy and shoot you before we hammer in the nails.”
“So,” the Don said to Fissolini. “Explain your disrespect.”
Fissolini stood upright and proud. “But the disrespect was not for your person, Excellency. I did not know how important and dear you were to my friends. That fool, Bianco, might have kept me fully informed. Excellency, I have made a mistake and I must pay.” He stopped for a moment and then shouted angrily and scornfully at Bianco, “Stop those men from hammering those nails. I’m going deaf. And you can’t scare me to death before you kill me!”
Fissolini paused again and said to the Don, “Punish me, but spare my men. They followed my orders. They have families. You will destroy an entire village if you kill them.”
“They are responsible men,” Don Aprile said sarcastically. “I would insult them if they did not share your fate.”
At this moment Astorre, even in his child’s mind, realized that they were talking life and death. He whispered, “Uncle, don’t hurt him.” The Don made no sign of having heard.
“Go on,” he said to Fissolini.
Fissolini gave him a questioning look, at once proud and wary. “I will not beg for my life. But those ten men lying there are all in my blood family. If you kill them, you destroy their wives and their children. Three of them are my sons-in-law. They had absolute faith in me. They trusted my judgment. If you let them go, I would make them swear their undying loyalty to you before I die. And they will obey me. That is something, to have ten loyal friends. That is not nothing. I am told you are a great man, but you cannot be truly great if you do not show mercy. You shouldn’t make a habit of it, of course, but just this once.” He smiled at Astorre.
For Don Raymonde Aprile this was a familiar moment, and he was in no doubt as to his decision. He had always distrusted the power of gratitude, and he believed that no one could direct the influence of free will in any man, except by death. He regarded Fissolini impassively and shook his head. Bianco moved forward.
Astorre strode to his uncle and looked him square in the eyes. He had understood everything. He put out his hand to protect Fissolini.
“He didn’t hurt us,” Astorre said. “He just wanted our money.”
The Don smiled and said, “And that’s nothing?”
Astorre said, “But it was a good reason. He wanted the money to feed his family. And I like him. Please, Uncle.”
The Don smiled at him and said, “Bravo.” Then he remained silent for a long time, ignoring Astorre tugging at his hand. And for the first time in many years the Don felt the urge to show mercy.
Bianco’s men had lit up small cigars, very strong, and the smoke wafted through the dawn air carried on the mountain breezes. One of the men came forward and from his hunting jacket took out a fresh cigar and offered it to the Don. With a child’s clarity, Astorre understood this was not only a courtesy but a demonstration of respect. The Don took the cigar, and the man lit it for him within cupped hands.
The Don puffed his cigar slowly and deliberately, then said, “I will not insult you by showing you mercy. But I will offer you a business arrangement. I recognize you had no malice and you showed the utmost regard for my person and the boy. So this is the arrangement. You live. Your comrades live. But for the rest of your lives, you will be at my command.”
Astorre felt an enormous relief, and he smiled at Fissolini. He watched Fissolini kneel to the ground and kiss the Don’s hand. Astorre noticed that the surrounding armed men puffed furiously on their cigars, and even Bianco, grand as a mountain, trembled with pleasure.
Fissolini murmured, “Bless you, Your Excellency.”
The Don put his cigar down on a nearby rock. “I accept your blessing, but you must understand. Bianco came to save me, and you are expected to do the same duty. I pay him a sum of money, and I will do the same for you every year. But one act of disloyalty and you and your world will be destroyed. You, your wife, your children, your nephews, your sons-in-law will cease to exist.”
Fissolini rose from his knees. He embraced the Don and burst into tears.
And so it was that the Don and his nephew became most formally united. The Don loved the boy for persuading him to show mercy, and Astorre loved his uncle for giving him the lives of Fissolini and his ten men. It was a bond that lasted the rest of their lives.
The last night in Villa Grazia, Don Aprile had espresso in the garden and Astorre ate olives from their barrel. Astorre was very pensive, not his usual sociable self.
“Are you sorry to leave Sicily?” the Don asked.
“I wish I could live here,” Astorre said. He put the pits of his olives in his pocket.
“Well, we will come every summer together,” the Don said.
Astorre looked at him like a wise old friend, his youthful face troubled.
“Is Caterina your girlfriend?” he asked.
The Don laughed. “She is my good friend,” he said.
Astorre thought about this. “Do my cousins know about her?”
“No, my children do not know.” Again the Don was amused by the boy and wondered what would come next.
Astorre was very grave now. “Do my cousins know you have such powerful friends like Bianco who will do anything you tell them they must do?”
“No,” the Don said.
“I won’t tell them about anything,” Astorre said. “Not even about the kidnapping.”
The Don felt a surge of pride. Omerta had been bred into his genes.
Late that night, alone, Astorre went to the far corner of the garden and dug a hole with his bare hands
. In that hole he put the olive pits he had secreted in his pocket. He looked up at the pale night blue of the Sicilian sky and dreamed of himself as an old man like his uncle, sitting in this garden on a similar night, watching his olive trees grow.
After that, everything was fate, the Don believed. He and Astorre made the yearly trip to Sicily until Astorre was sixteen. In the back of the Don’s mind, a vision was forming, a vague outline of the boy’s destiny.
It was his daughter who created the crisis that moved Astorre into that destiny. At the age of eighteen, two years older than Astorre, Nicole fell in love with him and with her fiery temperament did little to conceal the fact. She completely overwhelmed the susceptible boy. They became intimate with all the hot furiousness of youth.
The Don could not allow this, but he was a general who adjusted his tactics to the terrain. He never gave any hint he knew of the affair.
One night he called Astorre into his den and told him he would be sent to England for his schooling and to serve an apprenticeship in banking with a certain Mr. Pryor of London. He did not give any further reason, knowing the boy would realize he was being sent away to end the affair. But he had not reckoned with his daughter, who had listened outside the door. She came storming into the room, her passionate outrage making her even more beautiful.
“You’re not sending him away,” she screamed at her father. “We’ll run away together.”
The Don smiled at her and said placatingly, “You both have to finish school.”
Nicole turned to Astorre, who was blushing with embarrassment. “Astorre, you won’t go?” she said. “Will you?”
Astorre did not answer, and Nicole burst into tears.
It would be hard for any father not to be moved by such a scene, but the Don was amused. His daughter was splendid, truly Mafioso in the old sense, a prize in any form. Despite that, for weeks afterward she refused to speak to her father and locked herself away in her room. But the Don did not fear she would be brokenhearted forever.
It amused him even more to see Astorre in the trap of all maturing adolescents. Certainly Astorre loved Nicole. And certainly her passion and her devotion made him feel like the most important person on earth. Any young man can be seduced by such attention. But just as certainly, the Don understood that Astorre wanted an excuse to be free of any encumbrance on his march to the glories of life. The Don smiled. The boy had all the right instincts, and it was time for his real schooling.
So now, three years after his retirement, Don Raymonde Aprile felt the security and satisfaction of a man who has made the right choices in life. Indeed the Don felt so secure that he began to develop a closer relationship with his children, finally enjoying the fruits of fatherhood—to some degree.
Because Valerius had spent most of the last twenty years in foreign army posts, he had never been close to his father. Now that he was stationed at West Point, the two men saw each other more often and began to speak more openly. Yet it was difficult.
With Marcantonio, it was different. The Don and his second son enjoyed some kind of rapport. Marcantonio explained his work in TV, his excitement over the dramatic process, his duty to his viewers, his desire to make the world a better place. The lives of such people were like fairy tales to the Don. He was fascinated by them.
Over family dinners, Marcantonio and his father could quarrel in a friendly way for the entertainment of the others. Once the Don told Marcantonio, “I have never seen people so good or so evil as your characters in those dramas.”
Marcantonio said, “That is what our audience believes. We have to give it to them.”
At one family gathering, Valerius had tried to explain the rationale for the war in the Persian Gulf, which in addition to protecting important economic interests and human rights had also been a ratings bonanza for Marcantonio’s TV network. But to all of this the Don just shrugged. These conflicts were refinements in power that did not interest him.
“Tell me,” he said to Valerius. “How do nations really win wars? What is the deciding factor?”
Valerius considered this. “There is the trained army, brilliant generals. There are the great battles, some lost, some won. When I worked in intelligence, and we analyzed everything, it comes to this: The country that produces the most steel wins the war, simply that.”
The Don nodded, finally satisfied.
His warmest and most intense relationship was with Nicole. He was proud of her accomplishments, her physical beauty, her passionate nature, and her intelligence. And, true, young as she was, just thirty-two, she was a powerful up-and-coming lawyer with good political connections, and she had no fear of anyone in a suit who represented entrenched power.
Here the Don had helped her secretly; her law firm was deeply indebted to him. But her brothers were wary of her for two reasons: she was unmarried, and she did a great deal of pro bono work. Despite his admiration for her, the Don could never take Nicole seriously in the world. She was, after all, a woman. And one with troubling taste in men.
At family dinners the father and daughter argued constantly, like two great cats frolicking dangerously, occasionally drawing blood. They had one serious bone of contention, the only thing that could affect the Don’s constant affability. Nicole believed in the sacredness of human life, that capital punishment was an abomination. She had organized and led the Campaign Against the Death Penalty.
“Why?” the Don asked.
And Nicole would become infuriated all over again. Because she believed capital punishment would eventually destroy humanity. That if killing was condoned under any circumstances, then it could be justified by another set of circumstances, another set of beliefs. Eventually, it would not serve evolution or civilization. And believing that brought her into constant conflict with her brother Valerius. After all, what else did the army do? The reasons didn’t matter to her. Killing was killing and would set us all back to cannibalism or worse. At every opportunity, Nicole fought in courts all over the country to save condemned murderers. Although the Don considered this the sheerest nonsense, he nonetheless proposed a toast to her at a family dinner following her victory in a famous pro bono case. She had secured commutation of the death sentence of one of the decade’s most notorious criminals, a man who had killed his best friend and sodomized the newly made widow. In his getaway, he had executed two gas station attendants while he robbed them. He had gone on to rape and murder a ten-year-old girl. His career was brought to a close only when he attempted to kill two policemen in their cruiser. Nicole had won the case on grounds of insanity, and on the assurance that he would live the rest of his life in an institution for the criminally insane without the hope of release.
The next family dinner was a celebration to honor Nicole for winning another case—this time her own. In a recent trial she had championed a difficult principle of law at great personal risk. And she had been brought before the Bar Association for unethical practice and had been acquitted. Now she was exuberant.
The Don, in a cheerful mood, showed an uncharacteristic interest in this case. He congratulated his daughter on the acquittal but was somewhat confused, or pretended to be, by the circumstances. Nicole had to explain it to him.
She had defended a man, thirty years of age, who had raped, sodomized, and killed a twelve-year-old girl, then secretly hidden her body so that it could not be found by the police. Circumstantial evidence against him had been strong, but without a corpus, the jury and judge would be reluctant to give him the death penalty. The parents of the victim were in anguish in their frustrated desire to find the body.
The murderer confided to Nicole, as his attorney, where the body was buried and authorized her to negotiate a deal—he would reveal the body’s whereabouts in exchange for a life sentence rather than execution. However, when Nicole opened negotiations with the prosecutor, she was faced with a threat of prosecution herself if she did not immediately reveal the whereabouts of the body. She believed it mattered to society to protect the confi
dentiality between attorney and client. Therefore, she refused, and a prominent judge declared her in the right.
The prosecutor, after consulting with the parents of the victim, finally consented to the deal.
The murderer told them that he had dismembered the body, placed it in a box filled with ice, and buried it in a nearby marshland in New Jersey. And so the body was found and the murderer sentenced to life imprisonment. But then the Bar Association brought her up on charges of unethical negotiation. And today she had won her acquittal.
The Don toasted to all of his children and then asked Nicole, “And you behaved honorably in all this?”
Nicole lost her exuberance. “It was the principle of the thing. The government cannot be allowed to breach the lawyer/client privilege in any one situation, no matter how grave, or it is no longer sacrosanct.”
“And you felt nothing for the victim’s mother and father?” the Don asked.
“Of course I did,” Nicole said, annoyed. “But how could I let this affect a basic principle of the law? I suffered for that, I really did; why wouldn’t I? But unfortunately, in order to set precedents for future law sacrifices have to be made.”
“And yet the Bar Association put you on trial,” the Don said.
“To save face,” Nicole said. “It was a political move. Ordinary people, unschooled in the complexities of the legal system, can’t accept these principles of law, and there was an uproar. So my trial diffused everything. Some very prominent judge had to go public and explain that I had the right under the Constitution to refuse to give that information.”
“Bravo,” the Don said jovially. “The law is always full of surprises. But only to lawyers, of course.”
Nicole knew he was making fun of her. She said sharply, “Without a body of law, no civilization can exist.”
“That is true,” the Don said as if to appease his daughter. “But it seems unfair that a man who commits a terrible crime escapes with his life.”
“That’s true,” Nicole said. “But our system of law is based on plea bargaining. It is true that each criminal gets less punishment than he deserves. But in a way that’s a good thing. Forgiveness heals. And in the long run, those who commit crimes against our society will be more easily rehabilitated.”