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FOR SILVIA, BRUNO, AND ENRICO, WITH MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE
Every sweet hath its sour;
Every evil its good.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Essays
SOCCORSO MORTO
It sickened him.
It sickened him that after so many years, so little had changed.
Peppino was gone.
Barely ten years old, and dead.
The laws had changed a century ago. No more child labor, they said. No more six- and seven- and eight-year-old boys, the exploited carusi of past centuries, forced to work in the mines. No more naked children working fourteen-hour days in the narrow tunnels and the stifling heat, carrying impossible burdens of sulfur ore from the working face to the gill ovens—the toxic, lung-destroying furnaces on the surface.
Yes, the laws were all there, all written in black and white, filling those fat books he’d once seen lining the shelves in the office of a notaio, but laws are meaningless unless they are enforced. This was Sicily, where stubborn tradition never died, and never yielded.
Yes, changing times had forced the owners to raise some workers’ wages, but it was mainly the picuneri, the pick-men, who had benefited. In the remote defiles of la zona di Gallizzi, behind the forested slopes overlooking the main shafts and far beyond the apathetic gaze of torpid mine inspectors, the child labor laws were still ignored. Young boys were still being transformed into old men before they reached their late teens, deformed from long years spent in crushing physical work while their bodies struggled vainly just to grow to normal size.
He had been lucky. His carusi years had not begun until he was full grown. Unlike many of the boys, he hadn’t been sold to a heartless mine owner by desperate, starving parents. He hadn’t been surrendered in return for a payment of money—money to be repaid over long years from the meager earnings of the child.
Soccorso morto, they called it.
The Death Loan.
Aid for the family; death sentence for the child.
They had visited when he was barely five, sizing him up, preying on his mother’s poverty. Her solitude. Her desperation.
When he was six, they returned, with their cold-eyed smiles and their lulling words.
But his mother had steadfastly resisted their offers and their promises. She had worked and begged and scraped, and, yes, she had even stolen, to protect him. She had sometimes, for small payments, hidden rival Mafiosi in the two-room hovel they called home. But when he was fully grown, eighteen and strapping, he had gone himself to see the mine manager. With his cap in his hand, he had volunteered for the work.
In the mine, he had quickly proven himself. He was promoted to join the ranks of the picuneri. Every week he collected his pay and gave most of the money to the indomitable woman who had saved him from a childhood of torment.
He was so productive that the capo of his shift had assigned three carusi to work for him. He was different from the other picuneri, many of whom abused their carusi, often physically, and sometimes sexually. He tried his best to protect them, these boy-men. Although he was paid by the weight of ore he sent to the surface, he often sacrificed income in order to ease their burdens. It was always a balancing act. If it became too obvious, his capo would take one of them away from him. Maybe even two.
So he worked the face, swinging his pick, and tried his best to do right by his charges.
Yesterday, he had sent Peppino on an unimportant errand into a neighboring shaft, more to give the boy a rest than for any necessity of work. Unwittingly, he had sent the child to his death. A pocket of leaking gas, a spark from a pick, a flashover explosion, and it was over.
They’d recovered the bodies this morning. He’d held Peppino’s mother in his arms when she collapsed, smearing her clothes and her skin with the dirt and the soot and the stink of the mine that had murdered her son.
They both knew that her torment had just begun. She had lost her son to the death loan, but the loan remained unpaid.
Peppino had two younger brothers.
Her family would never be free.
Numb with exhaustion, he trudged up the cliff trail from the train station. Crickets crackled at his approaching step. Behind him, the vast valley was white and silent under the heat haze of the late summer sky. A profusion of wild poppies bordered the path he now climbed. It led to the ancient comune of Valguarnera Caropepe. This had once been a well-traveled road, but fifteen years ago, the rotting supports of a long-abandoned mine under the town had collapsed without warning, destroying both the roadway and a dozen homes along the top of the escarpment.
In ten days’ time, the train service that had carried him to and from the Floristella mine for every working day of his life would be abandoned as well.
Those thieving Christian Democrats, and those lying PCI swine, the loud-mouthed comunistas who never wasted a stray thought on Sicily’s miners or peasants—all those self-serving politicos who constantly talked of progress—all had promised that things would change, that things must change, that nothing would stay the same.
Nothing … except illiteracy and poverty and disease and death.
Nothing … except the raw abuse of power, and the fearful silence of the defenseless.
Everything was fluid, and yet … petrified.
It was no wonder that the Mafiosi had always come out on top.
He sank his pick into the broken earth of the hillside and used it to pull himself up the last few feet to the top of the escarpment. Pneumatic drills had long ago replaced the pick, but he always kept his by his side. There were some things that could only be done by hand—like digging yourself out of a cave-in when all sources of power had been cut off.
He threaded his way through the rubble that marked the northernmost terminus of Via Roma. The prospect before his weary eyes contrasted starkly with the avenue’s grandiose name. Cobbled in basalt from Etna’s quarries, laid down decades ago, the narrow roadway plunged steeply toward the center of town, a trash-strewn ravine of decaying tenements, cluttered catwalks, and sagging clotheslines.
He trudged south toward home.
One hundred and sixty meters later, his life changed forever.
As he was passing the cathedral, Valguarnera’s Chiesa Madre, he heard a child scream.
He turned to see a black Lancia Flavia sedan parked on the exit ramp from the church’s small parking area. He recognized the model instantly because he knew a lot about cars—mainly because he couldn’t afford one. But his attention was immediately drawn to the disturbing scene that was unfolding behind it. As he watched, a burly priest seized a fashionably dressed young woman by the front of her dress and drove a fist into her face. The woman flew backward onto the hard pavement.
Simultaneously, another priest was dragging a shrieking little girl toward the open rear door of the Lancia.
The miner recognized both men. He knew they were not priests.
T
he Lancia’s powerful engine revved up.
He ran.
He rushed along the driver’s side of the car and smashed the butt end of his pick handle through the open window, knocking the wheelman out of the fight before he could join it.
The thug holding the child went for a gun. The miner took him out with a powerful swing that drove the blade of his pick deep into the man’s skull. Bone fragments and blood and brains splattered the child as he yanked the steel out with one violent pull.
The man was dead before he hit the ground.
Released, the weeping child fled toward the cathedral.
The miner spun to face the woman’s assailant, and found himself staring into the barrel of a pistol.
He tensed.
BOOM!
The gunman’s body jerked and twisted. He struggled to raise his weapon.
BOOM!
He collapsed to the pavement and lay still.
The miner slowly turned.
A handsome young man stood at the base of the shallow steps that led from the church’s main door. He was holding a heavy revolver. He was impeccably dressed in a pin-striped three-piece suit, his shoes shone like mirrors, and he wore a boutonniere on his lapel.
The weeping little girl clung to his pant leg.
The man tucked the weapon into his jacket and hoisted the little girl into his arms.
The miner rushed to attend to the fallen woman.
PART
I
DOLORE
1
It started on Christmas morning.
At least that was when Kevin threw his first tantrum.
Later, looking back, Lucy realized that she hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
There had been the nightmares. Too many to count. Thank God they had recently stopped.
And, there had been the boy’s silences. She would find him staring into space, his face frozen in concentration. Or was it deep longing? She couldn’t tell. But the very adultness—was that even the word for it?—of her little boy’s expression had at times unnerved her.
She knew her son was different. There had always been an almost preternatural stillness about him. Even during the so-called “terrible twos,” she had known him to sit for hours in the presence of his mother, his aunt, and his uncle without fidgeting.
But these long, solitary silences were something different.
They were something more profound.
Today’s trouble began when Kevin tore the wrapping from a present, revealing a plastic construction set. It was a gift from his cousin Pauline. A few moments earlier, Lucy had patiently read the label to him while he’d been busily collecting his trove of presents into a serviceable pile.
He stared at the gift. His mood seemed to change. He jumped to his feet, raised the box high over his head, and threw it at the wall.
He threw it with surprising force for a four-year-old.
Pauline’s blissful humming abruptly ended. Jovial coffee talk among the adults died. Lucy moved quickly. She kneeled at the agitated boy’s side. “Kevin! That’s your present from Pauline! What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I want to go home!”
“What? You are home, sweetheart!”
“No! I want to go home!”
“But this is home! Here with Auntie Ricki and Uncle Jeff and Pauline.” Lucy hated the note of pleading in her own voice, but she was confounded and embarrassed.
“No!”
Ricki interceded. “Where do you want to go, Kevin?” she asked gently. “Where’s home?”
“Home!” He burst into tears. His voice rose to a shriek. “HOME!”
He ran crying from the room.
Lucy and Ricki stared at each other.
“What the hell was that?” Jeff muttered.
Pauline abandoned the present she had just opened and ran to her father. “What’s wrong with Kevin, Daddy?” she asked querulously as Jeff folded her in his arms. “Doesn’t he like the gear set we got him?”
Lucy started after Kevin.
“Did you notice?” Ricki asked.
Lucy broke stride. “Notice what? That my son just threw a tantrum, and he’s never done that before?”
“No. That he’s limping. It looks bad.”
Lucy hurried out of the room.
She found Kevin on his bed.
Fast asleep.
An hour later, the boy was wide awake and back to his old self. He was playing cheerfully beside the Christmas tree with the same Gears! Gears! Gears! Super Set he had tried to smash. It was as if nothing had happened.
Except for one thing: He was limping, favoring his right leg. And he didn’t seem to want to use his right arm.
When Lucy asked him if he’d hurt himself, he answered with a blank look.
“Your leg, honey. Did you hurt it?”
“No.”
“Then why are you limping?”
“What’s ‘limping,’ Mommy?”
“You’re walking like this…” She demonstrated.
“No, I’m not.”
But the limp didn’t go away. On the twenty-seventh, Lucy took him to Coral Gables Hospital. Twelve hours later, after a battery of tests and a hefty medical bill, she was told there was nothing physically wrong with her son.
“Perfectly healthy boy,” the doctor said. “Nothing abnormal.”
“But he limps! And his right arm—he doesn’t want to use it! How is that normal?”
“It can only be psychosomatic. Something may be deeply affecting your son, and this is just its manifestation. I’ll refer you to a child psychologist. In the meantime, you need to think carefully about the stressors in your household.”
So, Lucy Hendricks thought about stressors in her household.
Since before Kevin was born, she’d been living with her sister Erica—the gorgeous and inimitable “Ricki” to friends and family—and Ricki’s husband, Jeffery Barnett. Her brother-in-law’s busy legal practice had easily supported the purchase, a dozen years ago, of the couple’s spacious Coral Gables home. Sprawling over two acres, Casa Barnett boasted an imposing main residence, a separate guesthouse where Lucy and Kevin nestled in significant comfort, a swimming pool, and a tennis court.
Over the past four years, Lucy had devoted most of her time to raising Kevin and caring for her niece, Pauline, now a precocious eight-year-old with thick black curls and her mother’s startling hazel eyes. With the benign indulgence of Jeff and Ricki, she’d been able to live rent free in return for helping out as Pauline’s part-time nanny. The arrangement had worked well for both sides. It enabled Ricki to take over management of Il Bronte—“the Bronte” to locals—their ailing father’s bar and restaurant in Coconut Grove. And it permitted Lucy to bank her modest police widow’s allowance, and to use the rent she collected from her house in Bayonne to pay down the remaining balance on the mortgage.
But the pain was unending.
In the weeks and months after her husband’s death, horrified disbelief had slowly faded into utter desolation; desolation into numb exhaustion. Her life had seemed meaningless; her nights blistered by feverish dreams, her days a barren wilderness, empty of hope. Dolore immenso her father had described it, after the death of Lucy’s mother, his beloved Giulia, when Lucy was only twelve.
Immense grief.
It was a despair so deep and deadly that at times it had threatened her sanity. There had been moments when only her sister’s devotion, and her pregnancy with Jack’s child, had prevented her from taking her own life.
She had survived, but five years on, the keenness of her loss remained an ever-present anguish, informing her moods and haunting her relationships. Her days were consumed with a futile effort to stop herself from thinking. Time after time, the past rose to the surface. There were still days when she felt so sluggish with depression she could barely move. She had never come anywhere near the so-called “closure” that pop psychologists always prattled about. The term itself, she knew, had been lifted from the le
gitimate literature of psychotherapy and devalued by constant misuse. Nowadays, it was used to embrace every conceivable emotional circumstance.
And then there was the police counselor’s talk about grief being a “journey” to be worked through, with its own pre-prepared checklist of emotional states. If Lucy hadn’t been so lost in her wasteland of sorrow, she would have laughed in her face.
The fact was that none of the theories and the chit-chat and the checklists mattered. The only thing that mattered was that Jack Gabriel Hendricks, her soul mate, her protector, her lifeline—the man she had loved almost from the moment they met—had been brutally murdered, and the crime had never been solved.
In other words … forget closure.
Recently, Lucy had made a sincere effort to emerge from her shell. She’d signed on to work as a substitute teacher in the local school district, and she’d even spent a few evenings each week helping out behind the bar at the Bronte.
Not that the activity had sweetened her dreams, or lessened the ever-present throb of loss on the margins of her waking thoughts.
So, yes, there was at least one significant stressor in her household.
It was her.
2
“Sorry about Parrish. Met the guy once…”
“Oh yeah?”
“Back at the Academy. He filled in for an instructor who was off sick. Seemed like a good man.”
“He was a good man.” Detective Ernie Tait thumbed the remote, opened the rear door of their unmarked Dodge Charger and dropped his briefcase on the backseat. Then he squeezed his heavy frame behind the wheel.
Jack Hendricks took a deep breath of the cold night air. The ice storm of two days ago had changed back to sleet before finally easing off early this morning. The guy on the Weather Channel said the system had been a headache to forecast because its track was so erratic. One thing was sure: The roads were going to be treacherous. Jack wondered if he should have insisted on doing the driving tonight. The four months he’d spent at the Army’s Northern Warfare Training Center in Alaska had included a driving component; he wasn’t so sure about this aging detective’s skills.
Storm Rising Page 1
