But, first, he needed a worthy successor. His gaze roamed over to Gabe. Gabe was unreasonable, a real hothead. But, who would be worthy as his successor? Whom should he hand over the responsibility for the Vultures? His brother? He had not decided yet, and his brother was weak. He needed a man who was a suitable leader. Thoughtfully he took another sip of his espresso. Spontaneously he thought of his brother's son Aiden. He had been watching him. He was a true leader, he had what it took, but unfortunately, he had chosen the wrong side. Who knew maybe he could be convinced that it was worthwhile for him to change sides. Finally, everyone had a price and if not, the pretty little blonde who was always by his side might get into some accident or something. Things like that always helped to make decisions and worked miraculously. A wicked smile lit his distinctive features, "What are you thinking about?" Gabe's question brought him back to reality. He looked smiling at him, "What do you think about Aiden? Do you think we could win him over?" Gabe was totally set off track for a moment. What was his old man talking about? "Aiden? Why would you want him on our side? He's a wimp, and he lacks coolness. He is not cold blooded enough, and he is led by feelings. He is nothing but a softhearted wimp hanging around with his so-called friends and his cheerleader bimbo. Besides, he is not even quick witted. I’ve tricked the guy when I was four years old if you know what I mean."
"I know that Gabe. I know that he can’t compete with you. But, exactly that kind of sentimentalism, you are talking about could make him easy to be manipulated. You have to admit that he is a born leader and is likely to act cautious and prudent. I’ve watched him," he glanced lurking towards Gabe, "you, on the other hand are a hothead lad and act mostly without thinking about the consequences." Gabe wanted to argue, but Carmine Grande cut him off raising his hand, "Enough, I think I don’t need to remind you of the catastrophic storm this summer, you created in your anger. We need someone who is thoughtful and I think if we take care of the little Cheerleader, mess her up just a little, or threaten to do so, Aiden could be very useful for us." Gabe stared at his father. What was wrong with the old geezer? Did he want to degrade, his only son into the second row just because he made one tiny little mistake this summer. As if Carmine himself would always act deliberate and never made mistakes. Gabe felt anger rise inside. He had to pull himself together, as he wanted to scream in that arrogant bastard’s face, he couldn’t take it any longer. This time, he had gone too bloody far. Proposing Aiden to be the new leader in front of his nose was too much. No, matter what circumstances or strategies. The old sod would die, and he would die today. This much was clear.
He mustered up all his charm, putting on his best poker face, "Dad, you are so clever, you are simply the best. You see the opportunities clearly and Brooklyn is indeed Aiden's weak point. He's crazy about her." Carmine Grande smiled flattered licking his lips, "Well, no wonder that little cheerleader has a sweet little ass. Who knows, maybe I'm going to show her a few tricks, she might need a real man for once and not an immature boy like Aiden..." Gabe felt sick, his father was a pig, even if Gabe himself could be ruthless too, but Carmine Grande was far worse. He was a callous swine. He didn’t stop at anything when it came to getting what he had in mind. He even took into consideration to molest a sixteen-year-old girl. There was no doubt he deserved to die.
The cabin was a two-hour drive away. Carmine was wary. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that Gabe was up to something. He was unpredictable and he would do whatever it took to go to Sicily with the young Vultures, he wouldn’t stop at anything. It was even possible that he would start some kind of riot against him. Or in a worst case scenario, it might be possible that he would try to get rid of him one way or another, because he was against the trip to Sicily and thus standing in his way. Carmine was not sure how far Gabe would go. Anyway, he didn’t feel like figuring out either. Therefore, he wasn’t going to give him any chance to do something stupid and he certainly wouldn’t go out on that lake fishing with him. He could forget about that.
He was going to find a way to thwart whatever Gabe planned to do. For the moment, he put on a good face on a bad game. No one was getting past him just like that. He was alert and ready for Gabe s move, whatever it might be. They drove in silence through the autumn landscape. Each of them has specific thoughts and neither of them giving any attention to the autumn blazes of color. Each year, the Indian summer lured many tourists to Canada, as the red-brown-yellow blaze of color was a much-described phenomenon and the landscape looked even more splendid than it usually did. After two hours, they reached Lake Simcoe. The cabin was just outside the village, fairly isolated close to shore. Behind the cabin, there was a wooded area, ideal for a quiet weekend to go fishing, or for a couple wanting to be alone. Also, the ideal spot to kill someone inconspicuously, it was rare that someone strayed around the area. They unpacked their supplies and had a glass of French red wine. -Château Neuf du Pape-, a fine wine that ran hot down Gabe s throat. His whole body seemed to glow. He was more than just ready for getting rid of Carmine, "What do you think Dad, should we go out on the lake now? We could catch some fish for supper like old times and roast our catch over the fire." Carmine creased his face, "it's already after four, and the days are getting shorter. I don’t feel like getting around on the lake in the dark. I thought we drive to the Steakhouse in the village and have a juicy steak."
Gabe was angry because it would have been easy at dusk to throw Carmine out of the boat and eventually hit him over his smug face with a paddle. He pulled himself together, smiling mildly, "Sure Dad, no problem, I just thought we could have our catch for dinner, that's all." Carmine patted his shoulder in a chummy way, "We can go out tomorrow morning son, and I took the whole weekend off to spend time with you." How very noble, Gabe thought ironically. Carmine put his arm around Gabe’s shoulder, "I wanted to talk to you tonight about the future, I think it's time that I’ll take things a little slower. I want to give up the leadership of the Vultures, as you know, and I have decided that I will still give you a chance. Screw Aiden, after all, you're my son. So you’ll have to convince me that you're the right man for the job. You’ll have to show me that you can act sensibly and have only the best in mind for the local Vultures." Gabe looked interested at him. What was his old man up to? Perhaps there was still another way than to kill him if he thought about giving him the leadership of the Vultures. So he would play along till he found out what he had in mind, "How do you want me to prove it then? I'll do anything you ask me to, you know that." Carmine patted his shoulder once again, that seemed to grow into some annoying habit, Gabe thought to himself, "You'll find out soon enough. Get ready I’m terribly hungry I could eat a whole cow." Gabe had no choice but to follow him. What did Carmine want from him? What was he up to? Gabe was sure that he hadn’t decided all of a sudden and changed his mind. Apparently, he was playing him. He didn’t know what he wanted from him, but he would find out tonight. They drove to the Steakhouse nearby the Country Club and each time Gabe tried to talk to Carmine about his resignation plans, he strayed from the issue. It was just pathetic! He was driving him nuts. Gabe was barely able to keep his anger under control.
However, the evening couldn’t have gone any worse. After the second bottle of wine, Carmine began to molest the busty waitress making saucy comments. Gabe was seriously asking himself how long it would take until she was going to slap him in the face, because she didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in a conversation with Carmine. He was quite drunk in the meantime and was behaving accordingly. He turned to the waitress at the bar waving with a few hundred dollar bills in front of her face. God, how embarrassing, Gabe rolled his eyes he would go outside to smoke a cigarette. He told Carmine that he was going outside, but was not sure whether he had even listened to him. He was staring lustfully at the waitress who was still serving drinks without paying any attention to him. Gabe waited for Carmine to get outside the entrance, smoking his cigarette. After about ten minutes later he was getting impatient, what did his o
ld man take that long? He felt stupid standing outside waiting, so he went back into the restaurant to find Carmine. But, he couldn’t find him anywhere.
He had disappeared from the face of earth and with him the waitress. There was only a young man in a grey suit with thinning already gray matching hair and some hipster glasses standing behind the bar tapping a couple of beers. "Excuse me, I am looking for my father, an older man who has been talking to the waitress at the bar about a quarter of an hour ago. Do you know where he is?" He eyed him disapprovingly, "You mean the obtrusive gentleman who hooked up with Rhonda after her shift, was your father?" "Excuse me, what did he do?" Gabe looked baffled at the young man. "Yes, indeed. The two of them have taken off together, to be exact her shift wasn’t even over. She should have stayed one more hour. Your father should be careful, if Rodriguez gets to know that she took off with him, he will probably kill him." Gabe frowned, then again he thought that he didn’t really care who killed him, even better if it was someone else. The young man behind the bar read his silence apparently as lack of understanding and continued, "He is very jealous and can be quite violent." "Who's Rodriguez, her pimp?" Gabe almost laughed aloud, his old man seemed to have hooked up with some working girl, just delicious.
The young man looked indignant, "What are you thinking? Of course not! Only decent people are working in this restaurant, Rodriguez is her boyfriend, he can be very possessive, and violent at times, I can guarantee you that." Gabe lifted his hands defensively being slightly annoyed, "Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything to your establishment, but as it looks Rodriguez isn’t all that wrong being jealous, as this Rhonda apparently took off with my old man." The bartender's mouth twisted into a grimace, which should probably have been some smile, "Let's hope that Rodriguez doesn’t do anything stupid, he is still on probation and Rhonda is some money greedy bitch. Your father waved around pretentious with money bills and bought a bottle of our best champagne. Then they took off together."
"Simply adorable," Gabe rolled his eyes, his old man truly needed to lecture him about being spontaneous, hotheaded and not thinking previously about what he was doing, when he himself was imprudence in person and was probably getting shot tonight by a certain Rodriguez. He clinked glasses with Rodriguez in his imagination, for him it was fine if he killed the guy, even better if somebody else did. Then no one could hold him responsible.
He thanked the young bartender for the information and started to walk in direction of the cabin, as his Dad, drunk as he was, had taken the Ferrari along when he took off with Rhonda. It was not very far to the cabin and Gabe took a shortcut through the wooded area behind the cabin. The cool evening air felt good and sharpened his senses. He thought about his dad, what an unpredictable asshole, he never knew what he was doing next. When he arrived at the cabin, he took a long shower and then he lay down in front of the TV. He watched some stupid action movie. There was a scene with a planned murder, when they cut the brake cable. Gabe was suddenly all interested at the scene. Unfortunately, the target Person survived. Gabe was wondering what could have been done better to make it work out when his phone rang. He expected to have - the boozer - 'his father' on the line asking him to pick him up somewhere having forgotten in his drunken state of mind that he had actually taken the car with him. On the other hand, that he was fleeing from Rodriguez and needed his help. Which he could forget immediately. Gabe wouldn’t lift a finger, that much was clear. But, it was not his father, it was Angel, "Hey babe, just wanted to ask how the weekend goes with your Dad? Did you kill each other yet?" Gabe didn’t want to tell her the sad truth. Namely that his old man was a horn dog, so he decided to keep it vague, "No, Dad's already gone to bed, the red wine we had for dinner was a bit heavy." Angel chuckled, "He is not the youngest anymore, your old man, even the Botox and the false teeth don’t help in this case." Gabe didn’t’ know what to say. If Angel actually knew what was going on, she would die of laughter. He had to admit, that he was somewhat flattered because she apparently missed him. She might be a bitch at times, but since the fake kissing at the Crowd, there was some crackling in the air between them. He wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad. It could lead to complications, which would better be avoided, if something were going on between them. He didn’t need any more complications. Even if Angel was smoking hot and made him sweat each time, they touched. His father was enough of complications to handle at the time. He had his hands full with this darn ladies’ man. Where was he anyway? With his luck, he didn’t even come back to the cabin tonight and then the fatal fishing trip would fall literally into the water.
He had forgotten all about Angel who was still waiting for an answer on the phone. "Gabe are you still there?" He instantly got back to reality with his thoughts and he had to admit, that he wasn’t into any conversational chat with Angel for now. She would ask him questions about his father, to which he could not give her an answer, without betraying his plans and he had to prevent her from coming behind his plan. Angel might be hot, but she sure as hell was not stupid, what made her dangerous. He did well to keep her at an arm's length away. The risk that he burned his fingers was simply too big. He took the phone and tapped it lightly several times against the coffee table. He said sounding jerky - Angel - connection - and knocked a few more times against the coffee table, then he rejected the call. After a moment, his phone started ringing again. He took the call, saying, "Hello," and then he hung up again. He repeated this process for several times, each time she called again until Angel was apparently tired of calling back.
He hoped that she bought his story about having such a bad connection out here. But, he had other things in mind now and would call her later on when things were settled. Where was that stupid demented old geezer? The guy was driving him crazy. How could he possible scrag someone if he didn’t know where he was. Gabe paced back and forth furiously, trying to reach Carmine by phone. Exasperated, he threw himself on the sofa, turning on the TV again. He changed channels listlessly. Hundreds of programs and each channel was showing the same crap. Finally, he watched some international news channel, reporting about flooding in a small town in Sicily and a volcanic eruption. Suddenly Gabe was wide-awake, the topic of the program was total junk and drifted away to some corrupt mayor, who had not taken the necessary steps for renovations and arrangements since the last disaster and had squandered money by the Italian government, and associated with the Mafia. The citizens of the town were complaining about him, and there were even riots and looting going on. Chaos reigned, and each of them blamed the other one. No one took the blame even burglars were blaming the robbed citizen because one of them had shot at them to defend himself. Now the burglars dragged the victim to court. What an insane thing to do, unbelievable Gabe thought, if all Sicilians were that crazy it might be difficult to put a reasonable crowd of followers together. Even if they all seemed to be completely nuts, that wasn’t the reason why he was wide-awake all of a sudden. No, these politicians, a certain De Capitani and a lawyer named Di Benedetto were present and if he was not wrong about it, this lawyer happened to be Angel s father.
The news was quickly over and national issues were on again. Gabe sat there for a while pondering. If the volcano already started to become active, the time had come to feed a certain Gregory to it. Appeasing the volcano as the legend required the Vultures to do, if they didn’t want to lose their privileges. Damn, he really had to go to Sicily and it had to be at the planned time. There was much to prepare and he had to motivate his people. His father would not screw this up for him, he couldn’t allow that to happen, but the more he thought about the whole thing, he had to change his plans, or else his trip to Sicily was over before he even got there. He realized that there was no way he could kill his dad at this point.
The Family would make a big thing out of it. It became clear to him, that if there happened to be an accident, it had to be a perfect one. One that didn’t raise any uncomfortable questions. How about if Carmine lost his memory for a while
and was out of the Picture for this reason? If for that reason, he wasn’t able to take any decisions? It would give him time to do what he thought was right and no one would try to stop him. He called Angel back, telling her the news he watched about her father on TV, "We've got to go to Sicily, not only because of Gregory, but also because of your father. He sure needs you now more than ever." Angel was quickly convinced that their presence was required at home in Italy, after Gabe embellished the News a bit, claiming her father was being threatened.
"My dad, doesn’t want me to go to Sicily, he thinks the savior legend is none of our business, the Vultures in Sicily should deal with it by themselves. He says, we have nothing to fear here in Canada, as the Volcano is in Italy and the Prophecy was pronounced on the Volcano." Angel could hardly believe what she was hearing, "He is such a traitor, he knows quite well that most of us don’t have any powers in Sicily, only a few of us have powers." "Really?" Gabe hadn’t had any idea about this. "Didn’t he tell you, this disgusting back-stabber? We need you, otherwise we have no chance to deal with Gregory and the Akandos." That was interesting, Gabe thought and very practical. He tried to calm her, assuring her, that he was going to find a way to go to Sicily, and to convince his father about the urgency of this journey. Then he ended the conversation.
He picked up the phone again to call Gary. "Hey Gary, you looked at the car yesterday, didn’t you?"
Lerici, Italy 1997
Maria Rosa was running as fast as she could through the Train station of La Spezia. Her lungs were aching. She pressed the baby that was wrapped in a baby sling tightly to her chest. She couldn’t make it much longer. They would get her because she didn’t know where to go, and whom to turn to in this foreign city, in which she had only gone off the train because they were on her heels, she had been busted. Damn, but her plan had worked out so well. So many had helped her and risked everything to save her beloved baby Gaetano. But, someone among them had betrayed her, she didn’t know who and the people helping her escaping were surely going to pay for it. Shortly after Florence, she noticed that someone had tracked her down on the train. In Pisa, they had almost caught her and in La Spezia, she didn’t have any other choice than to leave the train in an unobserved moment. She hid for a while in the station toilets until the coast was clear. She wrapped the sling tightly around her body. Fortunately, Gaetano was sleeping. He was such a sweet baby. She wouldn’t allow it to happen, that they took him away. Only over her dead body they would get to him, she knew that they would kill him. She had overheard a conversation between Leonardo and his father. Leonardo was a wimp. There was no help to be expected from his side. He would sacrifice his own son if his father demanded it.
Elementary Virtue: The Prophecy Page 26