by Mario Puzo
"Oh, no, no," Cuto said. "You can have everything you want in Ucciardone. The guards are poor and the prisoners are rich, so it's reasonable that money should change hands. You can indulge every vice here."
Adonis looked around the pharmacy. There were shelves full of medicines and great oaken closets that held bandages and medical instruments, for the pharmacy served as a medical emergency room for the prisoners. There were even two neatly made-up beds in an alcove of the huge rooms.
"Do you have any trouble getting his medicine?" Adonis asked.
"No, we have a special requisition," Cuto said. "I delivered his new bottle this morning. With all those special seals that the Americans put on it for export. A very expensive medicine. I'm surprised that the authorities go to so much trouble to keep him alive."
The two men smiled at each other.
* * *
In his cell Aspanu Pisciotta took the bottle of streptomycin and broke the elaborate seals. He measured out his dose and swallowed it. He was surprised at the bitterness of the taste for that one second he could think, then his body bent backward in a great arc and was thrown to the floor. He let out a scream that brought the guard running to the cell door. Pisciotta struggled to his feet, fighting off the agonizing pain that wracked his body. There was a terrible rawness in his throat and he staggered toward the jar of olive oil. His body arched again and he screamed to the guard, "I've been poisoned. Help me, help me." And then before he fell again there was a great furiousness that he had finally been outwitted by Don Croce.
* * *
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mario Puzo was born in "Hell's Kitchen" on Manhattan's West Side, and following military service in World War II, attended New York's New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His best-known novel The Godfather, was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels published in the early sixties, The Fortunate Pilgrim and The Dark Arena; in 1978, he published Fools Die. Mr. Puzo is also the author of six screenplays, including Superman and Superman II. For both his screen adaptations of The Godfather he won Academy Awards.