I Contadini (The Peasants)

by Lester S. Taube

  Paul was with Boranski in the library, now converted into a command post, when the car following the one sent for Anthony radioed that the pickup was complete and they were heading home.

  “Alert the guards at the gates,” said Paul. “Tell them to be especially watchful when they open them for the Monsignor. That would be the logical time for a carload of gunmen to charge in. I think you’d better position a couple of the men between the gates and the house, just in case.”

  Boranski switched on a walkie-talkie and gave quiet instructions. When he was finished, he turned to Paul. “You’ve got a hunch about this, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Cy, all my vibes are working.” He stood at the window looking down the snow-covered quarter mile drive to the gates. He drew out a plan of the estate and studied it again. A paved road ran along the front wall of the grounds. In the center were the wide gates which gave entry. Two guards were stationed there, others posted halfway down each end of the property. A total of fifteen guards patrolled the grounds, and Boranski had four in reserve. If Mickey came over the walls, he would be overwhelmed by the time he got to the house. An attack that way didn’t make sense. With only a dozen gunmen, he would have to reach the house quickly and do his deed before counter measures were taken. That meant cars.

  Paul scanned the map again. Across the road was a woods belonging to the owner on that side. He also had a fence circling his estate, made of steel but higher than the Doninis. If Mickey planned to use cars to crash the gates, he would have to drive along the paved road, slow down to turn in, then roar up the drive.

  “Monsignor Anthony’s car is in sight,” said Boranski.

  “Well,” said Paul, slinging an automatic rifle, “let’s go on the balcony upstairs and test these vibes of mine.”

  He trotted up the steps, out onto the balcony, and focused a pair of binoculars on the gates. Boranski, the walkie-talkie in his hand, stood beside him, the four men in reserve remaining in the room behind them.

  Ettore walked out, a rifle in his hands. “You really think they’re coming, don’t you?”

  “It’s quite possible, Papa.”

  “But why now? Why not one hour from now, or tomorrow?”

  “It’s Tony, Papa. Mickey left Chicago directly after Tony phoned that he was coming. Maybe Tony’s phone is tapped. It so, Mickey knows exactly when Tony is coming through those gates.”

  “Monsignor Anthony’s car is approaching the gates,” said Boranski, listening over his radio to a report from one of his men.

  “Where are the women?” asked Paul.

  “I sent them to a back room,” his father said. Paul nodded in agreement.

  Anthony sat back in the comfortable seat of the delightfully warm Cadillac limousine, glad that his vacation had started. The atmosphere at the university had become somewhat stilted these past few months. After all, it was no little matter to have a sister, two brothers, a brother-in-law, and three nephews murdered in the space of four or five months. Plus a brother on the run. Everyone made an effort to sympathize, to pretend they were not dying of curiosity to know what was going on, but it was all too evident. Well, he would relax for a week, then go on retreat in three months. He glanced out the rear window. The green sedan with two men inside was still following them. Anthony chuckled to himself. Paul must be taking precautions. He wondered what happened to the two men who shadowed him so surreptitiously and diligently at the University, and who had gotten on the train with him. People tended to forget how utterly intelligent and observant Anthony was. Because he was a priest, they were inclined to believe his knowledge was canalized, to ignore the fact that he was thoroughly informed on just about everything that went on. Even sex. He had never had intercourse with a woman, but through his reading and talks with others, he knew as well as any man what the reactions were. He read voraciously, and being a trained speed reader, could complete four or five books a week. He didn’t like mysteries since the writer’s flaws were usually all too obvious. Any man could pull this incident or that piece of knowledge out of pure air, ignoring completely the reality that man is an extremely limited animal. Cowboy books were his cup of tea, as they dealt with basics. A man with his horse, the open sky, sleeping on the ground. Like a priest with his own fundamentals. Most of all, Anthony loved historical novels. He had read Freeman’s ‘Lee’s Lieutenants’ in two weeks, and enjoyed the series so much that he had read it again. One of his fellow priests borrowed his set and took seven months to peruse it.

  The car slowed for the turn into the estate. Anthony had visited it only once, for two days five years ago. He thought it was one of the loveliest places he had ever seen. A guard started opening one of the gates. Anthony frowned when he saw the naked revolver in his hand.

  Suddenly, a burst of gunfire struck at his ears! The window glass by the driver shattered, splattering shards throughout the car. Anthony turned startled eyes towards the woods across the road. Men were moving up, firing as they advanced. The two guards at the gates were shooting back as they pulled one open. The escort car behind his raced up to interpose itself between Anthony and the gunmen - the two men inside firing furiously. The attackers had evidently been waiting for this. Three men ran out onto the road and opened fire with automatic rifles. The windshield shattered as bullets ripped the guards apart. Their car went out of control and crashed into a tree.

  Through his binoculars Paul watched the fight. “Cy!” he snapped. “Take some men and get to the gate right away.”

  Boranski rushed down the stairs with three of his men, leaped into a waiting car, and raced it down the drive.

  Paul moved his binoculars up and down the road. The attack was a diversion, that he knew. The cars. Where were the cars? His vibrations grew more intense.

  The guards at the entrance had one of the gates wide open. The Cadillac began moving again. Paul cursed as he saw two attackers dash up to the rear of the car and pound on the back window. Anthony could be seen falling to the floor. The Cadillac lurched off. The two attackers dropped out of sight for a moment, then ran back across the road to the woods. Anthony’s car roared through the gate. The guards began pushing it shut as Boranski’s car came rushing up. He and his men leaped out to fight off the gunmen. But there was no need. The enemy had melted back into the woods.

  Ettore turned, ran down the stairs, then out the front of the house towards Anthony’s car coming swiftly up the road.

  Paul stood perplexed. Nothing made sense. The attack was a complete farce, a foolish, absurd fiasco. He raised his binoculars again and swept the woods across the road. A glint high in one tree caught his eye. He adjusted the lens. A figure was perched on one of the branches looking over the grounds through a pair of binoculars.

  Suddenly his blood turned cold. He leaned over the balustrade. “Papa!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

  Ettore was too far away to hear. Paul swiftly unslung his automatic rifle and opened fire. Bullets churned the ground by Ettore’s feet! His father stopped running. He turned startled eyes back towards the house. Anthony’s car was barely a hundred yards away. Paul dropped the rifle and leaped over the balustrade to the ground. A jolt went through his body. He rolled and gained his feet in a spring steel motion. Instantly, he was racing desperately towards his father and the car. Ettore was watching him, mystified, as the Cadillac slowed to meet him.

  “Get away from the car!” screamed Paul. He was closing the gap as the vehicle stopped near Ettore. “Away from the car!” he screamed again, his eyes bulging from the effort.

  Anthony grasped the situation at once. He jumped out of the car. “Run!” he shouted at the driver, then he grabbed Ettore and started rushing to one side. Ettore stumbled and fell. Without pausing, Anthony dragged him away.

  Paul finally got within range. With a huge surge of strength he leaped through the air to cover Ettore’s body with his own.

  A tremendous explosion deafened his ears. He felt steel tear into his body and a gush of wind deflect his spri
ng. By reflex, he flattened himself as he fell to the ground. Pieces of metal and glass rained on his shoulders. Then he jumped up and looked about. Anthony was seated on the snow, stunned. Blood poured from a gaping wound in his head. The driver was to one side, moaning with pain, a leg blown off. Ettore was lying flat on the ground.

  Paul ran to him and turned him over. A cry of horror and grief broke from his lips as he looked into the sightless eyes of his father.

  Anthony crawled over. “Oh, my dear God, dear God,” he mumbled. He fell across Ettore’s body, weeping.

  Paul sank back on his heels, his eyes closed, his lips quivering. A few moments later he was up on his feet and at the side of the driver, applying a tourniquet to the stump of his leg.

  A car rushed up. Boranski bounded out. “Across the road,” Paul said tightly. “A man in the tree. Get him.”

  When Boranski raced off, Paul turned the wounded driver over to a guard from the house, and went back to his brother. Anthony was kneeling by the body of his father performing the last rites. Paul listened quietly until Anthony finished, then he said, “Take Papa’s feet, Tony.” Together they lifted Ettore and carried him towards the house.

  Rose and Carol came running out as the two brothers reached the steps. Rose took one look and fell back against the doorpost. Carol put her arms around her as she began trembling and supported her inside. Paul and Anthony laid Ettore on a divan in the living room. Paul examined him. There was no wound in the front. He turned his father over. It took some searching to find the small hole at the top of the neck where a piece of steel had severed his spinal cord and entered his brain.

  Carol put down a phone she had spoken over. “Paul, I’ve called the police. They are coming with medical help.”

  He nodded. “Look after Tony.” He strode out of the room to the front porch and picked up the binoculars which had fallen during his leap from the balcony above. He scanned the woods. His men were searching it, but he knew the effort would be fruitless. A car came up the driveway and Boranski stepped out.

  “No dice, General, the woods are clean. I’ve sent men to the other side of the estate. Mickey’s people probably parked there, walked through the grounds, then cut holes in the steel fencing to get into the woods unseen. What happened here?”

  “The attack was a cover to plant explosives on the Cadillac. They knew we would come close to it to see if Monsignor Anthony was safe. The man in the tree had a remote detonating mechanism. He set off the charge when he thought he could get all three of us. Had he done so a couple of seconds sooner, he might have been successful.” He sighed in resignation. “How did our men make out?”

  “The two in the escort car are dead. One of the gatemen is wounded seriously and the Cadillac driver is pretty bad too. The gatemen think they winged two or three of the gunmen.”

  “Carol phoned for the police. They’ll be here almost any time now. Tell it as it happened, but make no mention of Mickey.”

  “All right, General.”

  “Move the other twenty men to Chicago as soon as you can. Did you get those items I asked for?”

  “Almost all.”

  The shrill of police cars and ambulances sounded. Paul stared down the driveway to the road and across it to the woods. “Bastardi,” he said softly in Italian. Then he did something he had never done before in his life. With a hand, he made the sign of the horns and spit through it three times.

  An army of police roared up, accompanied by a doctor in an ambulance. The wounded gate guard and the driver of the Cadillac were rushed off for immediate attention. Anthony refused to go away for treatment, so the doctor carefully stitched shut his scalp wound, bandaged it lightly, and gave him an injection of anti-tetanus serum. Paul had half a dozen wounds, all caused by small fragments of steel that he told the doctor to ignore. But he did accept an anti-tetanus shot and band aids over the larger ones.

  The police performed their investigative functions with complete courtesy and the knowledge that their efforts would be futile. Being well informed of the DiStephano-Bonazzi feud, they knew without a shadow of a doubt who had ordered the attack and murders. They also knew it was a waste of time to have the Chicago police pick up Bonazzi for questioning. But they immediately ordered a dragnet in the hopes of running upon gangland soldiers who participated in the shootout.

  Paul gave them little support. Coolly he explained that the mysterious deaths in his family had compelled him to place guards around the estate. Did he know who was responsible? Not at all. Of course there was a rumor about a Chicago feud, but that was sheer nonsense. Did he or his men recognize any of the assailants? No, they were all strangers. Yes, his people would be willing to look over the mug books to identify any listed therein. Why did he not request police protection? Police resources are limited, replied Paul. Since the family has sufficient funds to hire private guards, he considered it his civic duty to conserve those resources.

  Nonetheless, after the investigation, the police left a patrol car stationed on the road. Paul eyed it wryly. There was as much chance of Bonazzi attacking again as of a snowball freezing hard in hell. Paul knew exactly what Bonazzi now planned to do; to hole up in his fortress and prepare to counter the assault he knew was certain to come. As a general, Paul was quite aware that it was the worst possible time to take action. But as a man with the blood of his father in his veins, he knew he had to try. And Bonazzi, with the same sort of blood coursing through his body, knew it also.

  CHAPTER 19

  The family left the following day for Chicago in the new jet the company had bought for Paul. Ettore’s body went by commercial plane, escorted by a guard. Boranski was waiting when the jet landed to transfer them into long limousines for the drive to Ettore’s house. None of the family felt comfortable now about going inside, for it reeked of incidents so horrible that the happy memories of past years seemed like dreams, of unreal nightmares that belonged to other people.

  Paul and Anthony wanted the funeral to be small, confined to the closest of friends and associates. But Rose put down her foot. Papa deserved the biggest and best that could be arranged. The way he died, and even the reason why he died, were not the important considerations for the scope of the final goodbye; his funeral should be a testimony to the manner in which he had lived his years.

  And come they did, on the second day after Christmas, carload after carload, many others on foot and in taxis and by public transportation, braving the cold, gray day to pay their respects to the tall, hard-working, life-loving stone mason whose hands reached out in friendship to his fellow man. All the city’s notables attended, flanking the judges and congressmen and the senator, and the bankers who had found his word to be stronger than a contract. Rose looked through her tears and saw an old, shriveled man in a wheelchair and recognized the shoemaker with whom Papa had bartered work for work during the depression, and the widow with two strapping sons of the farmer who had provided milk at the same period.

  Ettore’s departure was like the end of a period of history, like the final hurrah of a breed which had faded from existence. As strongly identifiable as the settlers who stepped ashore on an unknown world, and the frontiersmen who crossed foreboding mountains and plains, and the Irish and Chinese who traded limbs and lives for ribbons of steel to weld together east and west, so did these hard, illiterate, dirt poor Italian workmen walk off cramped, tramp steamers and struggle with an equal fierceness to set their imprint on this land. Too destitute, too ignorant, too nugatory to have travel papers or passports, the immigration officials at the ports of debarkation just stamped their entry papers with W.O.P. - without passports. And from the loins of men such as Ettore, who never counted hours of work, came first generation judges and surgeons and priests and generals and engineers.

  The former local parish priest came out of retirement to conduct the mass and to speak the eulogy. As a young man, he had joined in marriage the rough handed stone mason and his newly immigrated bride, speaking only Italian at the weddi
ng, for the tall, hot-eyed girl knew less then ten words of English. About a dozen people were present, friends of Ettore, since neither he nor his wife had relatives in this country.

  The priest had been middle aged when he baptized the last of the DiStephano children, and through that quarter century of time he had seen the blessings from this union.

  He spoke slowly, only in Italian, of the story of this man, and those who did not understand the words understood the meaning. The priest told of the night he responded to a knock on the door to find Ettore with his tools and bags of cement and sand standing there, explaining to the priest that he had noticed a wall of the church which needed repair. He had labored nights for over a week after finishing his own work to mend the wall, then had disappeared without waiting for thanks. He spoke of the time during the height of the depression when Ettore had shown up at Christmas with the same number of gifts he had bought for his own family and asked the priest to give them out to the needy. The old priest pointed to the invalided shoemaker and told how the very next day he had asked Ettore for a small loan, but Ettore was unable to help because he had spent all for the gifts. Then the priest nodded his head in warm memory and said that Ettore had gotten the money for the shoemaker a couple of days later. He spoke of the small things that Ettore had done for his neighbors and friends and the church, and suddenly all the little pieces began to drop into the cup of a man’s life and fill to such overflowing and to such dimensions that the complete picture became clear, revealing to all a greatness they had never fully known. The priest told of the time certain powerful politicians asked Ettore to run for alderman, knowing full well he would win in a landslide, but he had laughed and said that an ignorant stone mason’s duty was to prepare his children to do all those important tasks.

  Paul’s eyes filled with tears as he heard this, and his heart ached as it had never done before. How often we look at and love and respect a person dear to the heart and not realize that the sum of the parts add up to much more than the whole. How often our own accomplishments seem to overshadow those we love until we learn the totality of the other’s achievements. I sit here and I am a general and I control billions of dollars of power, thought Paul, yet I am only the gun manufactured and aimed and fired by a man who, had he my advantages, would have soared a sky higher than did I. I made judgment at the kitchen table when I snapped that we were not Sicilian peasants with a vendetta on our hands, then left for the safety of three thousand armed troops while you, old man that you are, faced what had to be done, and locked your tears in your heart as your sons and grandsons and son-in-law were murdered. How many nights, Papa, did you lie awake and condemn yourself because of their deaths? Did you feel and taste the blood on your hands? I know, Papa. Forgive me.