He followed.
But then they started doing something strange. They drove right on the speed limit.
Like tourists.
If he paced them, he would stand out.
On the next curve, he eased off on the accelerator, slowed, and let a string of vehicles pass him. Then he sped up. He could just make out the Fiat now, in the far distance. The exit for Enna was coming up. He watched for their turn signal.
There it was.
He relaxed. He wasn’t concerned that the Fiat was lost from view by the time he took the exit himself. There was a good chance he would catch up within five kilometers. As he knew, a long section of road repairs just this side of the Borgo Cascino turnoff had reduced the highway to a single lane. A red light could hold them up for as long as five minutes.
His gamble paid off.
He joined a line of vehicles, six cars back from the Fiat. After about thirty seconds, the light changed to green and the line began to move. He was able to keep the Fiat in view all the way to the outskirts of Enna—the modern outskirts, below the old city on the mountain.
Then, at the junction with S561—the turnoff to Pergusa, and Valguarnera beyond—the Fiat swung across the oncoming lane, pulled into an Esso station, rolled past the pumps, and stopped.
It was facing back the way it had come.
Caught by surprise, and left with no choice, he drove on.
By the time he had found a spot to turn around, out of sight of the filling station, reversed course, and returned, the Fiat was gone. As he turned into the station and stopped, he saw a pair of white vans pulling away from the area where he had last seen the Fiat.
Then he saw it.
The Fiat.
It was passing the station, heading in its original direction, up the hill toward Pergusa.
But what he didn’t see confused him even more.
The woman, who had been sitting in the back behind the driver, was no longer there. All he could see were the graying heads of the two men.
He rolled his car forward, craning, looking around, checking his mirrors.
The insolent woman who had refused his invitation to dinner was nowhere to be seen.
He made a decision.
Tires squealing, he swung his car around the pumps, sending a fist-shaking attendant scampering for safety, and exited through the solo entrata ramp, nearly causing a collision.
Motor whining, he raced up the hill.
He was halfway to Pergusa before he regained contact with the Fiat.
When they made their final turn, he drove by, parked at the roadside and waited for ten minutes. Then he turned around and took the same unpaved road the Fiat had taken.
He parked at a picnic site and started walking.
41
Il Parco Minerario di Floristella-Grottacalda was the largest industrial archaeology park in Europe. It had been created as a museum of the Sicilian sulfur mining experience. As Joseph Tartaglia well knew, that history was a horrific one—a story that never sat well against the pastoral romanticism of homeland memories perpetuated by the island’s immigrant communities in America. Few had believed Joseph when he’d mentioned the brutal experiences of his early years, and he had long ago ceased talking about them.
And, until five days ago, he had never described them to his daughters.
It was here at Floristella that he had labored in the hot and poisonous galleries of the scores of mines that dotted the sinuous network of hills and valleys. It was here that he had witnessed the beatings of children, the scorching of young legs with hot lanterns to rouse them from collapse. It was here that he had witnessed the agonies, and the shrieks, and the deaths.
Decades before Joseph was born, strict laws had been passed against the soccorso morto, against the employment of children under fourteen, against the underground work of the damned. But those laws had been ignored. The mine operations had simply been moved farther back into the hills, far from the prying eyes of government inspectors.
In those years, Baron Pennisi—the absentee owner who preferred to spend his time lounging in his palace at Acireale, on the coast—had relied on a Mafia family to oversee and protect his mines. It was the hard men of that family who had perpetuated the true hell of Floristella.
The Mazzaras.
The road into the park from the main highway was a kilometer-long dusty track. Joseph and Dominic arrived at the park headquarters, an ancient building that had formerly housed the estate’s grape press, and stopped behind it. The parking lot was empty. Dominic emerged from the car into warm air and silence. There was not a soul to be seen—not even a park attendant. He ambled over to the headquarters building and tried the door.
Locked.
He caught Joseph’s eye through the open passenger side window. Joseph nodded.
Dominic returned to the car. The Fiat rolled out of the parking area and started down a sloping drive, past a carved wooden sign that read:
PALAZZO PENNISI
SOLO PER IL PERSONALE ADDETTO
Joseph had earlier explained to Dominic and Lucy that Palazzo Pennisi was the fortified manor house that had once served as home and office to the mine’s overseers. His descriptions had been helpful, but forty years out of date, so to ensure familiarity with the layout, Dominic, accompanied by Lucy, had driven to the site on the previous afternoon.
The unpaved service road the Fiat was now following was little more than a track. It made a long, descending loop through the forest, finally debouching into a graveled clearing in front of the building.
Though now a vast, boarded-up shell of whiskey-colored block and stone, it was not difficult to visualize how Palazzo Pennisi must have appeared in its neoclassical heyday.
Dominic parked near a steel barrier that blocked a tributary road—one that appeared to descend deeper into the Rio Floristella valley. He was about to press the rear hatch release when he felt Joseph’s restraining hand on his arm.
“Leave the chair,” he said. “I can walk.”
They stepped from the car. Dominic helped with a small backpack that contained Joseph’s oxygen supply, threading the cannula line under his friend’s jacket collar.
As they moved toward the manor house, Joseph stopped. He pointed at the opening of a trail that ascended, die-straight, up through the surrounding forest. “They used to call that the ‘wine road.’ It connected the grape press to the palazzo. There was a tiled sluice running down beside that path that went straight into the cellars.”
They resumed their walk.
“Over three hundred windows—and gun ports covering every angle of approach,” Joseph offered tonelessly, waving an arm at the building. “It was designed as a fortress, in case men like me decided they’d had enough.”
They were nearing the entrance. It consisted of a chain-link gate, set in an imaginary chain-link fence—a fence that consisted solely of evenly spaced metal posts, without a single scrap of fencing material connecting them. Beyond the ineffectual gate, through a stone archway, could be seen a main door. It stood partly ajar.
There was no sign of a custodian.
They entered. The huge foyer was cold and empty. The light from the open doorway barely penetrated to the far corners of the space. It was empty of furniture or decoration except for one feature. Arranged along one wall at the base of a flight of stairs leading to the upper floor was a grouping of framed pictures. On closer inspection, they turned out to be photographs—some out of focus, some clear, all in black and white. Photographs of naked boys, filthy, bathed in sweat, toiling at the working face of an underground gallery.
One picture caught Dominic’s eye. He leaned closer. In the background, at the edge of the picture, he recognized a familiar frown.
Joseph’s.
“The boy on the right is Peppino. That picture was taken two weeks before he died.”
“I’m surprised they were taking photographs. If laws were being broken, and the pictures were discovered, they could be used a
s evidence.”
“The mine director had a little side business. He rented some of the boys to certain men. Men with perverted tastes. He kept a catalogue. If the government is planning to convert this building into a museum, they’d better do their research.”
“We should keep going,” Dominic said. “Can you handle the stairs?”
“Yes.”
They climbed to the second floor, where they took a moment, while Joseph recovered his breath, to admire the polished pitch pine ceiling beams. Then they moved on, through light and shadow, to a doorway that led to a wide balcony. The valley of the Rio Floristella lay spread out below. Interspersed with recent growths of pine, eucalyptus, and rare Nebrodi fir lay the rotting remnants of three centuries of reckless mining. What the trees and wildflowers were now reclaiming had once been a barren scene of blasted, sulfur-scorched earth.
“That’s Pozzo Number Three—one of the vertical shafts,” Joseph said, pointing to a fifty-foot-high gantry of rusting metal. “Those workings were too easy for the inspectors to check, so the boys were kept in the oldest area, the Zona Galazzi. It’s up on those hills.” He pointed across the valley. “We picuneri made our own shafts up there, the decentiria, and they made the boys sleep underground, out of sight.”
The bright afternoon sun, sharp as a stiletto, cast a skeletal shadow of Joseph’s gaunt form on the wall behind them. It was emblematic, Dominic reflected sadly, of the man himself, now a shadow of the robust miner who had rescued his daughter.
He stood in silence, allowing his old friend a few moments of bitter reminiscence.
But they both knew there was another reason for their presence on this patio.
They were deliberately making themselves visible.
Finally, Dominic checked his watch and said, “It’s time.”
They reentered the main building, retraced their steps to the ground floor, moved to the rear of the building, and descended a narrow, curving stairway to the labyrinthine network of cellars below.
42
The cellars at Palazzo Pennisi consisted of a series of separate galleries that covered the entire footprint of the building. The largest rooms were located at each of the four corners of the vast rectangle, where immense oaken wine vats had once stood.
Dominic led Joseph to the gallery at the northwest corner. The concrete floor was mainly dry, but mottled stains spoke of recent intrusions of water. In one corner, a low archway led to a stone-lined shaft that, in turn, led upward to the surface. It terminated at a metal grating outside the palazzo’s main walls, thus providing a dusky facsimile of daylight below.
Three straight-backed chairs had been placed in the middle of the room. A lamp sat on a small side table. It appeared to be a battery-operated replica of an old-style oil lamp. It gave off dim but adequate light. Even so, and despite the muted glow from the vent shaft, most of the space they occupied remained in murky darkness.
Joseph removed his pack and hung it on the back of a chair. He and Dominic sat down, side by side, facing in the direction from which they had come.
They waited in silence.
Minutes passed.
Dominic kept checking his watch.
Ten minutes … fifteen minutes …
After eighteen minutes, they heard footsteps.
“They’re coming,” Dominic said.
The footsteps were on the stairs. Four, maybe five pairs of feet, one of which seemed scuffling and irregular.
“Don’t like the sound of that,” Joseph muttered.
After a few seconds, three men wearing dark clothing entered through the archway. Two of them were holding a fourth person, a struggling male figure. They frog-marched him across the room and shoved him headlong to the floor. He lay there, his breaths shallow, his face a smashed and bleeding ruin.
Nicolò Lanza.
Each of the three men drew a weapon—two autos and a revolver, as Dominic carefully noted. Immediately they moved aside as another man joined them.
Raffaello Mazzara.
“We found him outside,” Mazzara said with a twisted smile. “He claimed he didn’t know anything. We tested that. Guess he was telling the truth. Surprising … considering you two are staying with his father.”
If Mazzara had expected a reaction, he was disappointed. Dominic’s expression revealed not a hint of concern. He gestured toward the third chair, which had been positioned facing the ones he and Joseph were occupying.
“Please. Take a seat.”
Mazzara ignored the invitation. Instead, he fixed his gaze on Joseph, who was sitting perfectly still, his assisted breathing marked by the faint click of the oxygen apparatus.
“So, we meet at last, Joseph Tartaglia. I have waited a long time for this day.”
“How old were you?” Joseph asked. His voice was barely audible.
“Four. I was four years old when you murdered my father!”
“Preventing an armed man from abducting a five-year-old child is not murder, Mr. Mazzara,” Dominic interjected. “We don’t know what your mother or your uncle told you about that day … but Joseph is here of his own free will to explain exactly what happened.”
“Is that what you expected, Lanza? A friendly talk? Is that why you sent that message to my uncle?”
“Carcere di Opera. It’s a fitting name for an Italian penitentiary. But we both know how it works. Even from a high-security prison—even from solitary confinement—Antonio Mazzara controls your family. And he has sent you here to listen.”
Mazzara looked incredulous. “You expected my uncle to agree to an old-fashioned sit-down? You expected me to come here, listen to this old bastard’s excuses for killing my father—Antonio’s only brother!—shake hands, and go away? You expected that?”
“No. I didn’t expect that. Joseph did, at first. Unlike us, he has led a blameless life and, perhaps, a guileless one. So, as I say, at first he agreed to come, hoping that you in turn would agree, in our Sicilian way, to put a stone on it. Sperando di mettere una pietra su di esso.”
“At first?”
“He changed his mind when I told him everything. When he realized his family would never be safe from you.”
“And yet, here he sits.”
“Yes. He has come to watch you die.”
Mazzara stared in stone-faced disbelief. “Watch me die!” He splayed his fingers, indicating the armed men at his side. “Four of us, and two of you! Two old men, weak and”—he stabbed a finger at Joseph—“barely breathing!”
A soft voice spoke from the gloom behind Joseph’s chair.
“Two old men … and me.”
Lucy stepped into the pool of light.
“You were late, Mr. Mazzara. We were concerned.” She glanced down at Nicci Lanza’s prone form. “Now I understand.”
Mazzara and his men had jumped at the sound of her voice. Now his thugs had their weapons up and pointed at her, glancing at their boss, looking uncertain. As for Mazzara himself, Lucy had the supreme satisfaction of observing a look of confounded incomprehension on his face.
On the face of the man she knew as Robert Olivetti.
“LUCY?”
“None other.”
Recovering quickly—too quickly, Lucy warned herself warily—he asked, “How long?”
“How long have I known you were a liar and a murderer?” she responded icily. “Since Sunday, when you were sneaking around Coconut Grove, taking pictures of me and Dominic.”
“You’ve been following me?”
“Newark, Miami, Rome, Palermo,” Dominic interposed. “It’s not difficult to follow a man who never looks behind.”
“I’ll work on that.” He addressed Lucy. “What happened on Sunday?”
“I saw your birth certificate. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Olivetti was your mother’s name.”
“Birth certificate? How could—?”
“Easy. You keep it in that safe in your desk, along with a few other interesting treasures. Like the flash drive I g
ave you, with all its contents erased! It wasn’t hard to work out who took my laptop.”
“The break-in. So that’s what that was about.”
“You ran the car theft operation that Jack was investigating. The bracelet the M.E. found in Jack’s throat was from one of your old cases. I’m guessing you stole it from the exhibit locker and gave it to Scarlatti. So it’s also a pretty good guess that you ordered Ernie Tait to kill Cal Parrish. And that you ordered Tait and Scarlatti to kill Jack! It was your name that Jack got from Mulvaney, wasn’t it?”
“None of this will do you any good, Lucy.”
“Prosecutor, huh? I’ve got to hand it to you, Robert—it was a great cover. How many cases did you make go away?”
Olivetti said nothing.
“How many cases did you use to undermine the other families?”
Olivetti said nothing.
“You and Scarlatti—was all that staged for my benefit? Good prosecutor, bad cop—was that it?” She spit the next words at him. “Were you still sleeping with her when you were sleeping with me?”
A look of deep regret clouded Olivetti’s face. “I’m sorry, Lucy. You shouldn’t have come.”
“After you and I had those first drinks at The Starting Point, you tracked down the retired Immigration agent who had helped smuggle my parents into the country. You blackmailed him to get my father’s real name. That puzzled me, until Dominic told me your father didn’t drown in some lake up north—that he was killed in Sicily. In Valguarnera!” She laid a hand on her father’s shoulder. “Killed by a miner who risked his life to stop a kidnapping.”
“We Sicilians have long memories, Lucy.”
“Yes. And I guess that means you and I are here for the same reason.”
“And what would that be?” Olivetti sounded calm, but as he spoke his hand slipped behind him. It reappeared holding a gun.
“Castigo,” she replied.
“Retribution.”
“That’s it, Robert. That’s it exactly.” She took one step and placed herself directly in front of her father. “But only one of us will face that today.”
Storm Rising Page 26
