“Let me guess,” she said. “They’re from Caltagirone.”
“You know their work?”
“My mother left me a piece. It had belonged to her mother.”
“These aren’t that old. They were made to order. One of the artisans in Caltagirone had a problem. My father … made it go away. The man showed his appreciation.”
Lucy thought she detected a note of disapproval in Nicci’s voice.
Finally, he showed her to her bedroom. It was tucked away on the southwest corner of the second floor. Sunshine lay in bright patches on the carpet, and her travel bag sat waiting on the bed.
“This definitely looks like a girl’s room,” Lucy ventured, taking in the satin coverlet, the pillows edged with lace, and a hand-painted doll propped on the dresser.
“It was my sister’s. Her name is Gemma.”
“Where is she now?”
“Salerno. It’s near Naples.” He paused. “I’d better tell you. Don’t mention her in front of my father. She married against his wishes.”
“Sounds like there’s a story there.”
“This is an ancient, secretive land, Lucy. There are many stories.”
“That sounds almost poetic.”
“I read a lot.” He knitted his brow. “Is it correct, what I have been told? That you are a schoolteacher?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you are here, with Dominic Lanza.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he offered to bring my father back for one last visit. As you can see, he is ill. I’m here to take care of him.”
“And that’s all?”
“Yes.”
Nicci was plainly skeptical. He switched subjects. “How would you like a tour of the estate? I can take you around, show you how we make wine, olive oil…”
“I would like that. But what I need now is a few hours’ sleep.”
“Of course. Supper’s at eight. Shall I have the housekeeper wake you?”
“Yes, please. If I haven’t shown my face by seven, ask her to knock on my door.”
* * *
Supper might not have been such a trial if Lucy didn’t have so much on her mind. Only Silvio, Nicci, Dominic, Joseph, and Lucy attended the meal. The others on the estate, whatever their roles, apparently took their evening meal elsewhere. Lucy forced herself to participate cheerfully in the toasts, and tried to appear engaged, but it was a losing battle. It didn’t help that, in true Sicilian fashion, the food kept coming. Silvio left the room occasionally to consult with the kitchen staff, and he returned each time with a satisfied look on his face.
As the meal progressed, Lucy noted an odd contrast between the old man’s interactions with the serving staff and those of his son. Silvio was polite and considerate to a fault, and his employees’ responding affection was clearly sincere. Nicci, on the contrary, tended to be short with them, leading to tight faces in response.
By the end of primo, the third course, Lucy was done. By her ancestors’ standards, this was the first substantial course—hence its name—but that was no consolation. She was dog-tired and had already lost all interest in food by the time the antipasti had been cleared away. She struggled through primo and then—to the obvious disappointment of Oscar, Silvio’s smiling, impish chef, who kept finding excuses to enter the dining room so he could gauge their reaction to his creations—she excused herself, pleading exhaustion, and dragged herself back to her bedroom.
There was another reason she’d been happy to leave early. As she slipped under the covers, her mind replayed a tense exchange between Silvio and his son.
“Dominic and I have much in common,” Silvio had intoned gruffly, after a toast. Perhaps lubricated by vino, he had added, “We may be the men in the dark, but we own the men in the light.”
“Those days are coming to an end,” Nicci responded.
“We’ve had this conversation, Nicolò. Many times. We shall not repeat it in front of our guests.”
Nicci ignored the admonition. “You are trapped by history, Father. I am not.”
“I send my son to university,” Silvio said to Dominic. “You see how I am repaid.”
“I, too, have a college degree, Nicci,” Dominic interposed. “And I have put that education to work.”
“This estate”—Nicci waved a hand at their surroundings—“these lands … they should be enough. Why aren’t they enough? Why the perpetual plotting, the unending conspiracies?”
“With these lands came responsibility. Responsibility to the many families we employ and support. After I am gone, Nicolò, unless you are careful, you will lose these lands. You will lose them to other men. Men in the dark. Men who care little for the people under our protection. There will always be such men. In Sicily, you are an owner, or you are owned!”
As Lucy left the table, she went away with the distinct impression that Nicci had engineered the argument to impress her.
If so, he had misjudged Lucinda Tartaglia.
38
For Joseph Tartaglia, the visit to the cemetery was an emotional one.
Less so for his daughter. Lucy had never known her grandmother, who had died before Lucy was born. She knew her only as an enigmatic character in family lore and, more recently, as the indomitable protagonist in Dominic’s horrific account of her violent end. Her attachment to Nonna was dutiful, but it lacked the connective tissue of deep emotion.
Despite that, she was moved by the experience at the graveside.
Before their arrival in Sicily, and at Dominic’s request, Silvio’s aides had made some inquiries. With great difficulty, and with no small reliance on the element of intimidation associated with Silvio’s name, they had finally discovered where the unfortunate Pietronella Tartaglia had been laid to her final rest—in a cemetery behind an abandoned sixteenth-century convent near Pietraperzia.
Accompanied by Dominic, Lucy wheeled her father through a narrow gate in a discolored stone wall, and into a vast maze of ornate, above-ground crypts. They navigated along row upon row of elaborate marble mausoleums, all, by the look of them, erected and maintained at great expense. Engraved grandly into the lintel of each structure were family names right out of a history of the Cosa Nostra …
Famiglia M. Filippello …
Famiglia A. Bonanno …
Fam. Rocco Calderone …
Famiglia P. Leggio …
They passed one crypt where otherwise padlocked steel doors stood wide open. Inside, in a space that could easily have accommodated a respectable private chapel, a squad of uniformed workmen toiled away, polishing and cleaning.
“I’ve heard it said that Sicilians devote more time and money to the dead than they do to the living,” Dominic observed.
“By the time this is over, we might be doing the same,” Lucy replied.
Lucy’s humble grandmother, they knew, was not to be found among the prestige funereal addresses in this section of the cemetery. Aided by a hand-drawn map, they finally arrived at the miserable plot near a rear wall where Joseph’s mother lay buried. After a long moment of respectful silence, and after Lucy had gently dabbed a tear from her father’s cheek, she and Dominic left him there with his thoughts and his memories. As they departed, Lucy could hear his voice, low and halting. He was speaking Sicilianu—the centuries-old dialect of Sicily that northern Italians couldn’t understand, and Lucy had never mastered.
Joseph was talking to his mother.
They returned to their borrowed Mercedes.
“We’ve heard from Palermo,” Dominic told her, as they waited. “They’re on their way.”
“So … it’s on.”
“Thursday, at four.”
Today was Tuesday.
“And, today?”
“Get some rest.”
“I will. But first I’m going to accept Nicci’s offer and take a tour of the estate.”
“He could be a problem.”
“Why do you think I’m going?”
Twenty minutes later, Lucy’s cell rang once. She walked back through the cemetery to meet her father.
* * *
“How are your nerves?” Joseph asked, as she wheeled him along.
“That’s the first time you’ve asked me that, Papa.”
“Papa? You never call me that. Not since you were—”
“We’re in Sicily now.”
“You know I didn’t want you involved in this.”
“Well, I am. It’s a little late to argue the point, isn’t it?”
“I’m old, Lucy. It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”
“It does to me. It does to Ricki.”
They arrived at the car.
“How are you so calm?” Joseph asked Lucy as she helped him out of his chair.
“All those years ago, at the Chiesa Madre in Valguarnera … did you hesitate?”
“No.”
“Neither did I … with Tait. So I guess it’s in our blood, Father.”
“What about Tait?”
Lucy glanced at Dominic, who was stowing Joseph’s chair in the trunk. “You didn’t tell him?”
“Left that out,” Dominic replied.
Her father repeated the question. “What about Tait?”
“Later, Papa.”
“Lucinda, tell me! What about Tait?”
She faced him. “I killed him! With Jack’s dive knife. And I’d do it again, believe me!”
Her father sat in the back of the car, behind Dominic, on the drive back to Silvio’s.
Lucy could feel him watching her.
Joseph Tartaglia was sitting very, very still, looking at his youngest daughter through newly opened eyes.
39
Lucy spent the rest of the day with Nicci Lanza, touring his father’s vast landholdings in a golf cart. He arrived at her room wearing a polo shirt, skin-tight jeans, turquoise running shoes, and a designer scarf wound around his neck in the rather vain style favored by other young men she had noticed on the streets of nearby Caltanissetta. There was a faintly metro-male air about him, which was only enhanced by his liberal use of some heavily fragrant hair product.
The vernal equinox was still two weeks away, but already a harsh sun was flaying the hillsides. Flocks of noisy starlings wheeled and dipped above them as they bounced along the estate’s network of tracks and lanes.
“Everything we do is certified organic by the European Counsel of Agricultural Ministers. The regulations are very strict—stricter than in America. Getting that certification was my doing,” he told her. “My father resisted me every step of the way because he couldn’t cut through the red tape like he usually does. We had to go by the book.”
The planted lands were a mottled carpet in every direction, readily surveyed from a succession of hilltops where Nicci stopped their cart and launched into what sounded like practiced monologues.
“Those green fields are all in wheat,” he told her, waving an arm at a vast stretch of bottom land where foot-tall grasses ducked and rippled with each stray current of the hot, dry air. “We plant it in early December, and it’s usually ready to harvest by June. One of the big organic food companies in Germany buys our entire crop every year.”
They drove to the next hilltop.
“None of our other crops have really gotten started yet. Our workers are spending their time pruning back the olive trees and the vineyards, and spreading fertilizer. It’s a good time to fertilize because we usually get a few good rains in March.”
Lucy had seen no sign of rain since her arrival. In fact, what had struck her was the impossibly clear air of central Sicily, and the spectacle of a deep blue sky that was utterly free of clouds from horizon to horizon. But she vaguely recalled her father once saying that terrible storms—sometimes death-dealing storms—seemed to come out of nowhere in the ancient land of his birth.
She had the night of Hurricane Sandy to remind her that sometimes the death-dealing came from agencies other than the weather.
As the day wore on, Lucy found herself impressed with Nicci’s intelligence and determination, but she found his conversation an unsettling combination of fine-tooth comb and steamroller. On the subjects of organic farming, wine making, and soil chemistry his knowledge and interest level were granular. On the subject of his father’s businesses, his pronouncements were blunt, sweeping, and unforgiving. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he would one day be the beneficiary of it all. In the wake of extensive land reforms in post-war Italy, Silvio Lanza’s estate—over four thousand acres of rolling countryside—was comparatively unique. On the flight over, Dominic had explained that his cousin had assembled the estate from smaller landholdings. At times Silvio had paid a fair price to willing families whose puny allotments could not support them. At times he’d used more traditional Cosa Nostra methods to achieve his ends. That his blatant reversal of the regional government’s land reform process had been allowed to proceed unhindered was not really surprising.
After all, this was Sicily.
Ironically, and entirely at odds with Nicci’s incessant assertions of righteousness, this grown son of a Sicilian capo displayed a depressingly aloof lack of concern for the dozens of farm workers in his father’s employ. At their various stops along the tour, he tended to address these people abruptly, and at times imperiously.
Lucy did not fault him for rejecting his father’s lifestyle.
But she did fault him for an arrogance bred of the privileges that that very lifestyle had brought him. And she faulted him for blinding himself to danger—not only the risk his egotism would bring to himself, but the risk to all the workers and their families who would depend upon him for protection after his father was gone.
The Mafia was many despicable things, but above all else it was family.
Family at all costs, yes.
Family soaked in blood, yes.
But family.
Lucy’s reaction to Nicolò Lanza was unalloyed. By the end of the day, she pitied him.
Ignorant of the impression he had made, he asked her to dinner.
“You mean, not here at the house?”
“No. Just us. There’s a place near San Cataldo. A traditional farmhouse. They accept only a few diners each night. You eat outside, under the trees. I thought you would like it.”
“Thank you, Nicci, but I shouldn’t leave my father.”
“I’m still not understanding. This visit … you … your father … Dominic Lanza. He is a much-feared man in your country, is he not? A padrino?”
“I suppose, if you believe the Internet. I don’t care. He’s been a good friend to my father, and to me.”
“To you? Tu sei insegnante! A teacher!”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“That’s all you need to know.”
“Tell me why you’re really here!”
Lucy swung her legs out of the golf cart. She stood up and faced him. “You’ll have to ask your father.”
Nicci’s tight smile told her that he already had.
Dominic was waiting when she returned. He touched his lip, warning her not to speak. He led her through the main house to an isolated portico that looked out over the western hills, where sunset had become a fiery pageant of glowing clouds.
Her father was sitting there, bathed in ruddy beams of dying sunlight.
“Now…” Dominic said.
“You need to keep him out of it,” Lucy stated bluntly.
Dominic nodded. “That was our assessment. Fortunately, his own father agrees. Silvio has arranged an errand. He’s sending him to Castelvetrano tonight.”
“He’ll be suspicious.”
“Maybe, but he’s all talk. He won’t disobey his father.”
Joseph seemed to be barely listening. He reached for Lucy’s hand. “I remember these sunsets,” he said, emotion in his voice.
The entire western sky had turned a deep crimson.
“When the sky looked like th
at, Nonna would say to me, ‘We might not live at the ends of the earth, but you can see it from here.’”
40
He had been keeping careful watch.
He had an impression of preparations.
Quiet, careful preparations.
Another vehicle had shown up in the compound. A nondescript three-year-old Fiat.
Silvio Lanza had always scorned “nondescript.” It wasn’t in the old man’s nature to tolerate second rate. The cane he carried said it all. Gleaming ebony and shining solid silver. A cane, carried but never used, had always signified one thing in Sicilian society, and one thing only:
Power.
Then, just after noon on Thursday, the Fiat emerged from behind the iron gate and picked its way down the broken pavement of the access road, past the sprawling vineyards, and joined SS640, heading northeast, toward Caltanissetta.
There were three of them in the vehicle: the two old men and the young woman who had arrived with them.
The daughter of the man in the wheelchair.
He followed them, staying three or four cars back, sometimes five or six. Tailing a vehicle was an easy task on Sicilian highways. There were always nervy, impatient drivers, tailgating, passing on double-solid lines and on corners, if only to gain a car length, oblivious to the ultimate futility of their actions on roadways clogged with giant, crawling trucks.
So he let them overtake, and from time to time he passed them himself in order to stay in position. He knew his driving would blend in; that anyone alert and watching mirrors would see nothing out of the ordinary—just cars and vans, passing and jockeying and dodging in and out.
Before the Fiat reached Caltanissetta, it took the Enna-Gela exit. At the bottom of the long hill, it took the second exit, looping around and under to join SS626 north. The next exit, eight kilometers ahead, would lead to the back way into Enna. He doubted they would take the longer route via the autostrada.
Storm Rising Page 25
