his brothers. When the man from Catania journeyed on across his territory to gain the same declaration from his wife's brothers, he was watched by three picciotti on motorcycles. The driver of a bread-delivery van shadowed the man from Catania as he drove the big Mercedes, weighed down by the reinforced windows and by the armour plating inserted in the doors in his cousin's repair yard, reported on a meeting with his consigliere. A student from the medical school of the university watched the home of a capodecino in the Ognina district of the city to which the man from Catania came. All of them, the taxi driver and the picciotti and the driver of the bread-delivery van and the student, were paid by the man from Catania. All of them betrayed him and reported his movements to Tano, who belonged to Mario Ruggerio.
Slugs and snails, after rain has fallen, move from their cover, leave the slime of their tracks, ignore the hazard of poison pellets, crawl forward to kill the plants that have no defence.
Slugs, on their bellies, on the move… A woman who cleaned the living quarters in the carabineri barracks at Monreale had met with Carmine before her slow and laboured walk to work. Her husband's first cousin's son, from Gangi in the Madonie mountains, was held awaiting trial in Ucciardione Prison… Her security clearance to clean the living quarters of the barracks had not picked up the family connection, but the vetting had not been strict as her work did not give her access to sensitive areas of the building.
On her knees she scrubbed a floor. Two pairs of feet were in front of her, waiting for her to move her bucket of soaped water. When she looked up she saw the uniformed carabiniere officer and his colleague who was dressed in the clothes of a building artisan. With reluctance, she pulled the bucket to the side of the corridor. They passed her by, as if they did not notice her. She knew the names of all of those officers whose rooms she was not given access to, and the door of the room of Giovanni Crespo was locked to her. When she reached the end of the corridor, where the doors opened out on to the car park behind the barracks, she could see the small builder's van, washed in the driving rain, with the ladder tied to the roof frame and with the stepladder jutting up between the seats. The cleaning woman had a poor memory. In pencil, on a scrap of paper, she wrote the registration number of the van. Without the help of a good lawyer, her husband's cousin's son would spend the next eight years of his young life in Ucciardione Prison.
Snails, crawling in their slime, on the move… The leader of the surveillance team of the squadra mobile had read the reports of each of the teams working the Capo district, pitifully brief reports. He took those reports to the apartment of the magistrate. Three days gone, seven days remaining, nothing seen that related to Mario Ruggerio. The magistrate smiled his thanks, seemed to expect nothing else, as if he realized that only ten days of surveillance with only three teams of men, only three men to a team, made the task impossible. What surprised the leader of the surveillance team, there was a brightness in the gloom of the room that the magistrate had made his workplace. The brightness was from flowers. He knew, everyone knew, that the magistrate's wife had gone north with the children, but the flowers were a woman's choice. The flowers were on the magistrate's desk, right beside the computer. He told the magistrate that his men were the best, that they were all committed, but that the time and resources given them were inadequate. When he left the magistrate, he went through to the kitchen where the bodyguards smoked and played cards and endlessly read the newspapers' sports pages and drank coffee, he asked after his friend, the maresciallo. But his friend was away on a course. There was nothing more to keep him in the apartment. He left the guards and the lonely and isolated man. He hurried through the splattering rain to the Capo district and his own shift. It would be a bastard, wandering through the labyrinth of alleys in the rain.
It was three years since Peppino Ruggerio had needed to drive to Castellammare del Golfo. Then to eat a meal with his brother and to meet with a foreigner, today to take lunch with his brother and to meet with a foreigner. It was the Spanish language that Mario had needed three years before, and again today… There was a direct route from Palermo to Castellammare del Golfo, on the autostrada to Trapani, and there was the country way. His choice, today, was to use the remote road, narrow and winding, that went south of Monte Cuccio and north of Monte Saraceno.
The clouds had gathered from early morning, darkening and spreading from the west. The rain had hit the car as he approached Montelepre. Not until he had driven his big car out through the villa's high gates had he made the snap decision to go to Montelepre on his way to Castellammare del Golfo. He came as a pilgrim to Montelepre, the town hanging, as if on crampons, from the rock face. He came today to Montelepre to see the birth place and the living place of Salvatore Giuliano. It was right that he should come to Montelepre as a pilgrim and consider and learn the lessons of the life of the bandit, and of the death. Nothing changed in Sicily. The lessons remained, as apposite now to Peppino and his brother as they had been nearly half a century before to Salvatore Giuliano. He came in humility, as a pilgrim, that he might better learn the lessons.
Peppino parked his car outside the Pizzeria Giuliano at the top of the town, where the roofs were merged with the cold rain cloud. He looked around him. He was huddled under the drop of his raincoat, which he had draped over his head and his shoulders.
The rain bounced from the cobbles and spattered his shoes and the legs of his suit trousers.
There was no money in the town, no opportunity, no work. The rainwater gushed down the steep alleys around the Chiesa Madre, and the terraced homes faced with cracked ochre plaster seemed to crumble before his eyes. A lesson: there had been money in the town when Salvatore Giuliano, the bandit, had lived here, but with his death it was gone. A lesson: Salvatore Giuliano had been hunted by many thousands of carabineri and troops from the regular army, and it was said he was responsible for the killing of more than four hundred men, and he had been destroyed when his usefulness had expired. He did not know where in the town Giuliano had lived, did not know in which piazza Giuliano had organized the firing squads that executed men for
'disrespect of the poor'. A lesson: Giuliano had been the master tactician, the expert in the art of guerrilla warfare, and he had been an angel to the poor of the town, and he had been the handsome idol of the young women, and nothing could have saved him. A lesson: far from home, abandoned by those who claimed to be his friends, in Castelvetrano to the south, the cheek of Giuliano had been kissed by the Judas-man Gaspare Pisciotta. A lesson: a man who had been a king was shot to death as a dog in a gutter. Peppino stood in the high streets of Montelepre and the rain ran in his shoes and wet his socks and soaked the trouser legs at his ankles. It was important to him to learn the lessons. Power ended when usefulness expired. A man climbed fast, reached beyond himself, and fell fast. Trust was a kiss, and a kiss was followed by a bullet. He felt the better for it, felt as though the lessons learned by a pilgrim made him wise and more cautious.
Old men hurried past him, sheltering under black umbrellas, and they would have clapped when Salvatore Giuliano had stood in the piazza, and they would have spat when the news had come of his death like a dog in a gutter. A girl watched him. She had a young, plain face, she was fat at the ankles, she wore a cotton dress and had no coat against the rain. She stood outside an alimentari and held a plastic shopping bag. Her father would have told her, and her grandfather, of the fate of the man who climbed too fast, ended his usefulness, and was betrayed. Her mother would have told her, and her grandmother, of the beauty of the face of Salvatore Giuliano. He wondered if the girl dreamed of the bandit. When the rains were finished, when the evenings were hot, did she go to the cool grass under the olive trees, did she look for him? For her, did Salvatore Giuliano live, a fantasy between her thighs? Did she worship him, conjure him to her, an imagination in the hair of her belly, when she was alone in the darkness?
He laughed, in grimness, in privacy, as he looked at the young woman's face.
Ridiculous. OK for the Americans, OK for the Presley freaks… Another lesson: after the Judas kiss and the death like a dog in the gutter, perhaps there was no memory other than the fantasy and imagination of a girl with fat ankles. He walked back to his car.
There was a last lesson to be found by the pilgrim in Montelepre: Gaspare Pisciotta, the trusted deputy of Giuliano, had betrayed him, had died in the medical room of the Ucciardione Prison in shrieking agony, poisoned by strychnine. It was important to learn the lessons of what had gone before.
He drove down the switchback road out of Montelepre, away from the rain-drenched homes and the legend of Salvatore Giuliano.
He went through Partinico, and on through Alcamo, where there had been the first refinery for Turkish poppy paste, and his brother's share of the wealth from the refinery in Alcamo had been the beginning of the cash cascade that had paid for an education at the university in Rome and the school of business management in Switzerland. Alcamo stank of sulphur fumes, said to have been released by the fractures caused by a minor earthquake. Money held in the cash-deposit markets in New York and London, good and long-term and steady-earning money, had come from the refinery in Alcamo.
He drove down towards the sea.
