by Peter Watson
The captain moved again, to stand behind the animal and inspect the braiding. He lit another cigarette and picked more tobacco from his tongue.
“Everything happened so suddenly,” said Silvio. “There hasn’t been time to undo it.” What was going through the mind of the captain? Had he seen something?
Suddenly the rain gusted and the sbirri began to think about shelter.
“Go,” said the leader to Silvio, who immediately kicked the mule into action.
The captain called after him, “I had my first woman at sixteen.” And he cackled again.
Silvio rode for half an hour, to put as much distance between himself and the police as he dared. But it was still raining and he didn’t want his precious, awesome object to get wet. He led his mule off the road and threaded his way through the trees until he could not be seen by anyone passing. He dismounted, went round to the rear of the creature, and began to unbraid the tail.
Harriet Livesey pulled back the net curtains and looked out at the July morning. A fresh sun splashed across Cadogan Gardens. In normal circumstances, this would have filled her heart with joy, but not now. Deep inside, she hoped she might see her brother getting down from a carriage, signaling the fact that this awful business was over. But there was no one other than the postman on the far side of the gardens. London could not be the same until her brother was safely returned.
She sighed and made her way downstairs for breakfast, taking Rhum, her highland terrier, with her. He skittered down the stairs ahead of her, his fur a blur of white against the mahogany paneling of the stairwell. He had been such a comfort since her brother had been kidnapped two months ago. In the breakfast room, at the front of the house on the ground floor, the table was laid for two, on her instructions. She would not abandon her brother just because he had been seized by some tawdry Sicilian thugs. A place was set for Henry at all meals, as a symbol of Harriet’s faith that the affair would all end well, and to show that the household was ready to welcome him back at any moment.
“Good morning, Edna,” she said to the young woman who stood by the sideboard.
“Good morning, miss,” the maid replied, dipping slightly in a small curtsy. A priest’s family was not aristocracy, but Father Henry Livesey had a good private income since his elder brother, a soldier with the Wessex Regiment, had been killed in India.
“I’m not hungry, Edna. Just tea, please.”
Before she picked up the morning paper, she glanced around the room. In Henry’s absence she was in charge and was determined that the house should appear spick-and-span on his return, whenever that might be. Nothing had changed in the room since the previous day, of course. Those two damned pictures still dominated the wall opposite the windows. They were damned because one of them was a landscape, which ironically showed a valley that Henry owned at Fontana Murata in Sicily, a valley that contained valuable sulfur mines. They were the reason for his journey to Palermo and beyond, the journey on which he had been kidnapped. The second picture was by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a portrait of Henry and Harriet’s great-grandfather, General Sir James Livesey, whose campaigns for Wellington had founded the Livesey fortune. The picture was unexceptional but it was a Lawrence, and in a routine valuation made by Christie’s about three months earlier, just weeks before Henry had left for Italy, it had been valued at four thousand guineas. By another bitter irony, that was more or less the sum that the Sicilian brigand, Nino Greco, was asking for her brother’s return.
Edna brought the tea and set it on the table. Rhum sat near his mistress and looked up expectantly. Sometimes he was fed scraps of whatever she was eating. Not this morning.
Harriet had been in favor of paying the ransom. What was one painting here or there? Unfortunately, the family solicitor, William Baldwin, who had power of attorney over Henry’s effects in his absence, thought otherwise. Baldwin had been outraged by the demand and had brought in the local member of Parliament, Sir Rupert Farrar. Farrar had raised the matter in the House of Commons, and after that payment was impossible. The foreign secretary spoke from the dispatch box in the House, criticizing the failure of the Italians to protect travelers in their land, and his comments had been widely reported in the newspapers. For Harriet then to have quietly paid the kidnappers would have smacked almost of treason. But for all Farrar’s and the foreign secretary’s huffing and puffing, Henry was still missing. The Italian government had promised help, but that was all it had been, so far as Harriet could see—promises.
Harriet was opening the Morning Post when the doorbell rang. In the early days, she had responded to unexpected arrivals at the front door with excitement, as if it might be Henry. She no longer felt that way. In any case, this sound was not entirely unexpected. She glanced at the clock on the sideboard—ten-fifteen. Probably the mail delivery.
She drank some tea and scanned the newspaper, then there was a knock on the breakfast-room door. Venables, the butler, appeared.
“The post, miss.”
Harriet waved to the sideboard.
“No, miss.” Venables stood his ground and Harriet looked up sharply. He held the silver tray forward. “It’s a package from Italy. A Palermo postmark.”
Harriet set down her teacup. She swallowed, then wiped her lips with her napkin, stood up, and took the package. Venables left the room. He was right, though: the package had been posted in Palermo two weeks before. Harriet’s name was written clearly in blue ink, printed by what appeared to be an uneducated hand: some letters were in capitals, some were not. It was tied by string but not sealed with wax.
Of course it was from the kidnappers. She was in no doubt. Should she send for Baldwin, or the police? Even as she thought this she was already turning over the package and pulling at the string. Why a package? What could be inside? The first communication had been a simple note: one page. She removed the string and fumbled with the paper.
At first she didn’t recognize what was inside. Then her body seemed to register the truth before her brain did. She felt the blood draining from her face, and a crawling sensation at the back of her neck. She became short of breath and tears forced their way into her eyes. Then she uttered a short, involuntary scream, and fainted.
The package fell from her grasp and landed beside her on the carpet. Rhum was for a moment alarmed by his mistress’s fainting but was soon more interested in the object she had dropped. He sniffed at it but hadn’t touched it by the time Venables, hearing the commotion, rushed back into the room.
Venables recognized the object as quickly as Harriet had.
It was a human scalp.
2
Nino Greco was in his late thirties but still a very fit man. The muscles on his thighs and forearms were as hard as the bark on an oak tree. The skin that stretched over his body was smooth; no wrinkles yet. His eyes were dark and deep, like the waters of Lake Arancio. He had been born in Campobello, near Licata, but his mother had died giving birth to him, just as his common-law wife, Tomasetta Priola, had died giving birth to Annunziata. Such deaths were far from uncommon in Sicily. Nino’s father, Fermo, had been foreman at a quarry near Gela, and when he was thirteen Nino was taken there to work. All went well for two years. Then it turned out that Nino’s father was the chief supplier of explosives to the local Mafia. The explosives used in a bank robbery at Catania had been traced to the Gela quarry and Nino’s father had been charged, convicted, and imprisoned.
For the three years that his father was in jail, Nino was kept on at the quarry and learned the trade. He was taught how to make explosives, where to place them to dislodge the right amount of rock, how much was needed to create a particular effect, how fuses worked, and much else.
When Fermo Greco came out of jail, the Mafia looked after him. He couldn’t go back to the quarry, so he was found a job as a guardino, collecting protection money in the olive groves around Licata. For three years Nino enjoyed the only steady, stable time he had ever known—would perhaps ever know. His father was a hard man, t
oo, but he had a sense of duty where his son was concerned. He gave Nino a number of tips about explosives. No less important, he took his son to Palermo, where they savored the life—the nightlife especially—of the port, with its bars and brothels.
Fermo and Nino were to some extent protected by the fact that they were cousins, the junior branch, of the Priola family. The Priolas owned several large steamships but could only avoid labor problems in the docks with a little help on the side. Although the Palermo Priolas were a rich, prominent family, behind the legitimate shipping and transport business there was a less respectable enterprise run by some of their relatives.
At the age of seventeen Nino had been initiated into the delights of sex in the notorious Via Scina in Palermo. On one weekend, two of the Priola brothers had been especially solicitous, providing Nino with several puttane, as the women were called, and with copious amounts of the thick Sicilian red wine of which the young quarryman was becoming very fond. Exhausted, hungover, and feeling pleased with himself at having had four women in the course of the day, he had passed out.
When he came to, there was a man in the room. An unpleasant-looking individual with a long nose and crooked teeth, he had begun by asking if Nino had enjoyed himself.
“What’s it to you?”
“Because, my friend, nothing comes free. You had the time of your life yesterday. Now it’s your turn to pay.”
Nino had panicked. “Pay? But I’m only seventeen. I work at a quarry. I don’t earn much—”
“I know who you are and what you do.”
“But … but, we’re family, sort of.”
“Yes, I know that, too. I’m family, believe it or not.”
Nino looked at the man. He could have fought his way out of the room except that he didn’t have any clothes on. It was only then that he realized he couldn’t actually see his clothes. They weren’t where he had left them. Someone had removed them. He was suddenly very frightened. The day before, the night before, had been a setup.
There was total stillness in the room until at length the other man smiled. “I see you now understand.”
Nino lapsed into a sullen silence. The other man was not in the least bothered by this. He lit a cigarette, taking his time about it, breathing smoke into the stale air of the room.
“You’re an explosives expert. You have access to certain substances we want.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“You’re seventeen: old enough to know what not to ask. Just listen. In a moment I’m going to give you your clothes and I’m going to take you outside. I’m going to take you to a building, a bank, here in Palermo. Inside that building I will show you a door. It’s a metal door to a room-sized safe. You have to work out how much explosive is needed to blow the door. The door and nothing else. Then you have to get that amount of explosive for us.”
By the time the man had finished, Nino was shaking. This was a carefully thought-out plan. His mind was working fast, but again he lapsed into silence.
The other man let the silence linger, appearing to enjoy his cigarette. Then he said, “Don’t get mad, and don’t sulk. Do this job well and houses like this”—he gestured at the walls around them—“can be yours for the asking.”
He let a small pause elapse before going on, in a brighter tone. “We’ve been watching you. You’re good, maybe better than your father. When he employed you, on our instructions, neither he nor we knew how you would turn out. It was a good investment.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. “Nino, your father is as much a part of all this as anyone. Accept it. Now let’s go!” He turned his head and shouted, “Beppo!”
The door opened and another man stood in the doorway. He was holding Nino’s clothes. The man who had been doing the talking gestured forward, and the clothes were thrown onto the bed.
Nino had gone through with the first set of instructions reluctantly, and only because his father was so obviously in danger. But the bank job had been a glorious success, so successful that he had received more lire than he earned in six months at the quarry. By now he was addicted to the brothels of Palermo and had spent everything he made from the bank job within a matter of weeks. Nino was soon as enthusiastic a robber as anyone else. Before he was eighteen he had supplied the explosives for four major bank raids. He enjoyed the thrill, he enjoyed the earnings, and above all he enjoyed the whorehouses.
And that of course was his undoing. What eighteen-year-old quarryman could afford the fleshpots of Palermo? It wasn’t long before he was visited by the sbirri, wanting to know how he found the money to visit the brothels of Via Scina. His answer—that he was a successful gambler at the Foro Biondo—was difficult for the sbirri to disprove but he did not convince them either. From then on he was watched, and followed.
A year later a gang war broke out on the docks of Palermo. Hitherto the labor gangs had been controlled by the Priola family, who looked after the gang leaders so long as Priola ships were unloaded first, and quickly. Sicily exported oranges, lemons, and olives to France, Britain, Holland, and America. There being no way to keep the fruit cool, speed was all-important. When, therefore, the owners of a new steamship line, the Orestano family, concluded a contract with some independent orange growers near Platani, the Priola organization was threatened. The Orestanos wanted rapid service, too, and used the same docks.
The important figures in the docks were the mandatori, the middlemen who put the fruit and the customers together. These were hereditary positions, passed from father to son and always run by the local Mafia. Until that point most of them had been under the protection of the Priola family. When two mandatori were found garroted—the traditional Sicilian form of strangulation—the Priolas’ reputation as protectors of the middlemen was threatened. Other mandatori immediately began to hedge their bets, putting Orestano fruit together with their better customers.
A response was called for—one that was swift and far more terrible than anything the Orestano family would ever contemplate: a response that involved explosives.
Nino was well aware that he was still being followed by the police, but he had long ago established a routine whereby others in the family could buy off any sbirri in an emergency. For a few hours at least he was able to evade his “shadow.” The explosives were duly delivered, and the next day the Orestano warehouse went up, raining oranges—or rather the remains of oranges—over the docks. As a countermeasure, it was highly effective. The only problem was that not only oranges were blown up. Two people were killed.
The deaths made it inevitable that the police would now search out Nino. The chain of events was circumstantial but too strong to be overlooked this time, and the police, now desperate for an arrest, would not bother about lack of evidence. The evidence would come later.
And so Nino went underground. It was not generally known that the sister of the abbot at Quisquina was married to a Priola. The family did not advertise the fact; but occasionally the bloodline came in handy. Nino spent two months at Quisquina, dressed as a monk, until the warehouse business had died down.
However, he couldn’t stay in the abbey forever and he needed money. Cattle rustling provided the answer at first. Tunisia was a ready market for cheap Sicilian meat, and stolen cows were cheaper than any other kind. The risk was minimal, and specially adapted boats or barges regularly left Sicily’s southern shore with anywhere from twenty to forty cattle.
But Nino could never escape the fact that he had helped to kill several people. This gave him a notoriety that he never sought. On one occasion when cattle were in short supply, he and a few friends raided a quarry near Chiaramonte to steal yet more explosives. These were used to attack the railway between Messina and Palermo, which was then just being built. They ransacked the wages wagon and took away a load of dynamite used for blasting. His notoriety grew.
By now Nino had established a new base for himself at Bivio Indisi, after it had been cut off by a landslide caused by volcanic activity at M
ount Etna. The bivio had been completely abandoned and Nino and his followers simply moved in one weekend. It was overlooked by the Indisi and Catera mountains, near where two ridges joined. The road from Filaga, which disappeared under the landslide, could be observed. Any other approach involved a two-day trek across mountains. It was as secure as an eagle’s eyrie on Mount Cammarata.
Nino was hard and ruthless, but he was clever, too. He realized from the start that he had to have a power base. To get that, a Mafioso in Sicily needed not only strength but style, and that is what Nino had to acquire. In the cities and towns the Mafia leaders had protection rackets: they took a share of almost everyone’s profits or income in return for fighting their battles. Nino had his links to the Priolas in Palermo, but they couldn’t be used too often or too obviously. He needed to stand up for himself. That was when he had hit on his own form of malavita, as the underworld was called.
The Church of the Redeemer, in Erice, was soon robbed of its Tintoretto, a mournful Madonna and Child, and quickly ransomed back. This might have been an unpopular crime had not Nino made it his business to distribute much of his profits to the peasants in the area where he lived. He also gave some of the ransom from the theft to the monastery at Quisquina. The crime was a double-edged move on Nino’s part. As well as establishing his popularity, it brought him protection, since the beneficiaries of his largesse would never divulge where he was living. And it gave him a quasi-political status. The Quarryman’s robberies were seen, by the local population, as a form of protest. In supporting the peasants, he was seen as criticizing the Italian government for its neglect of Sicily.
As a result, Nino had soon attracted all manner of acolytes and hangers-on, many of whom were themselves refugees from justice. “A dog is not a dog without its fleas” was how the cardinal archbishop of Palermo had put it. Quite a few of these people were relatives in a distant way. Some brought their wives and families. Soon they were a “family” of nearly a hundred. In time, the Quarryman’s family became more settled. Twice a year perhaps, they would plan some spectacular raid, then retreat to the remote complex of old farm buildings that had become home. There they cultivated what land they could, but mainly lived off what they hadn’t given away—until the next raid.
