The Vendetta Defense

good.”

“Dogs are essential.” Bennie grinned. “Now, I want you to get out of here. Do you want to stay at my place tonight?”

“No, I have a hotel reservation and everything. I’m fine. I really am fine.”

“A hotel? You want me to take the dog? She can play with mine. Have a sleepover.”

Judy considered it. It only made sense. It was in the best interests of the golden. “No. I want her with me.”

Bennie laughed. “Meet me in the office at nine. We’ll talk then. Take the back way in. I’m hiring two new guards downstairs and two upstairs, every day until this trial is over.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Now get out of here. Here comes the press.” Bennie peered over the hood of the Saturn. Anchorpeople were advancing, with bubble microphones and whirring video cameras, and Bennie fended them off like a mother grizzly. Her concern remained with Judy. “Are you okay to drive?”

“Okay enough to lose those clowns,” Judy said, and Penny assumed the shotgun position.

“Then go, girl!” Bennie stood, rising to meet the press, as Judy gunned the Saturn’s engine, backed out of the space, and took off, leaving the orange makeup, the blue uniforms, the yellow tape, and all the other colors behind.

Judy had lost the last of the two press cars twenty minutes later, mainly because their pursuit was only half-hearted. She switched on the radio news, KYW 1060, and it was all Coluzzis, all the time. The big story was at the crime scene and apparently the home of Marco Coluzzi. Judy sympathized with Marco’s wife and small children. John Coluzzi couldn’t be reached for comment.

Judy felt a wave of guilt. She should have foreseen this. She had underestimated John’s ruthlessness. Killing his own brother. Three other men dead. Innocent men. Their blood stained her hands and clothes. Judy stopped at a red light but didn’t notice when it changed. A van driver honked her into motion, and she cruised down Broad Street toward the hotel. Exhaustion was catching up with her, as was sadness. Would the killing end now? Would it only get worse? Would John assume power? The questions bewildered her.

She cruised to another traffic light, barely concentrating on her driving, letting her thoughts run free, and they brought her to an insight. The Coluzzis had waged a war against her and had pushed her to the extremes of irrational behavior, namely driving over to the Coluzzi offices to confront Marco. So she was no different from Pigeon Tony. If they had pushed her as far as they had pushed him, killing someone she loved, would she have killed in return? It was at least conceivable, but she hadn’t known that before. It made her understand what she had been wondering about from the beginning of the case. Bennie had asked her to decide whether Pigeon Tony was innocent or guilty.

Well, she had decided.

He was innocent.

The knowledge, or at least the certainty, brought Judy a sort of peace. The events of the day, as heinous as they were, ebbed away. She rolled down the windows and drove through the quiet city in the dark of night. In time the air cooled and a light rain blew up, dotting the windshield, and she drove to the sound of the beating wipers, gliding past the hotel. She didn’t think twice. Didn’t stop to go back.

Judy took a left onto the expressway and put on the cruise control. There was no traffic at this hour. The decorative lights outlining the boathouses on Boathouse Row reflected in wiggly lines on the Schuylkill River, its onyx surface disturbed by the shower. Judy turned smoothly on the curve past the West River Drive, heading out of the city.

It was a straight shot out the expressway to Route 202 and off at Route 401, winding through cool, forested streets. She slowed to permit a herd of deer to leap nimbly over a post-and-rail fence and smiled at Penny’s astonished reaction. In time the streets turned into lonely country roads without stoplights or streetlights. There was nothing to guide Judy but the stars and she couldn’t navigate by them at all, though her father had tried to teach her. But the Saturn found its way through Chester County to the abandoned spring-house, navigating by something much more reliable than the stars, though an equally natural phenomenon.

The human heart.

Judy pulled up on the wet grass, but Frank was already there to meet her, rushing toward the car and lifting her into his arms, warm and so powerful. She didn’t have to say a word because he was kissing the blood and pain from her face and soul, and when she asked him finally if she could spend the night, he said:

“I thought you’d never ask.”

BOOK FIVE

La massima giustizia e la massima ingiustizia.

Extreme justice is often extreme injustice.

—Italian proverb

Justice must follow its regular course.

—BENITO MUSSOLINI,to a journalist, December 10, 1943

“Calm down, old man! You will see, it will be nothing at all.”

—A member of the firing squad to one of the Fascists he would execute on January 11, 1944, among them Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano

Chapter 37

The piazza in Tony’s village was small, a single square of gray cobblestones bordered by the church, a bakery, and a butcher shop. Beside the butcher’s on the corner squatted a tiny coffee shop where Tony took his little son Frank every Friday at four o’clock, early so as not to ruin his dinner, as Silvana had asked. Tony didn’t mind occasionally being bossed around by his wife, especially as it concerned their child. Silvana was a devoted mother, tempering her rules with tenderness, and for that reason Tony felt especially guilty that he was sitting outside the coffee shop having an espresso with a two-year-old.

“Espresso is not good for young children,” Tony whispered, as if Silvana would hear him, even with the house kilometers away. His guilt didn’t stop him from his practice, however, and, weather permitting, father and son occupied the front table, sipping their coffees and watching the townspeople walk by. “Take little sips, son.”

“Si, Papa.” Frank nodded, held the tiny white demitasse in two sets of chubby child’s fingers, and concentrated mightily to bring the cup to his little lips. Tony watched his son with pride and pleasure in even this small act, taking in the soft fringe of Frank’s black eyelashes as he looked down, the rosiness of his cheeks, and the pinkness of his lips. The summer sun, low in the sky now that the farmer’s work was done, shone on Frank’s coal-black hair, finding strands of earth brown and even dark gold. Tony marveled that he never grew tired of looking at his son, drinking in all the details of him, even when Frank made the face he always did at his first taste of the hot coffee.

“Is hot, Papa,” Frank said, lowering the cup partway to his saucer.

“What do we do then?” Tony asked, for he was teaching Frank the manners of gentlemen in society.

“Watch, Papa.” Frank formed a little circle with his lips, not easy for him, and blew across the surface of the hot espresso. “See?”

“Yes. I see. Very good. Just like the wind. Pretend you are setting a boat sailing across a large, blue ocean,” Tony said. He had never seen a boat, much less a large blue ocean, but he hoped his son would someday leave the farm and see the ocean, for it wasn’t very far away. Unlike his own father, Tony wanted his son to grow up better than he, to go to school, to learn to read and write, and associate with city people without feeling like their servant. “Very good job, son.”

“See, Papa.” Frank blew so hard he made ripples in the tin cup. “Do you? See?”

“Very good. Blow gentler, son,” Tony said, keeping the harshness from his tone, for he knew children needed praise more than they needed lessons on coffee drinking or good manners.

Frank stopped blowing, his face now quite red. “Can I drink?”

“Yes, yes. Good job.”

Just then Signora Milito walked by, carrying her brasciole from the butcher shop in a cloth bag on one arm and her heavy purse of needlepoint in the other arm. She was a wealthy woman, with her face made up and expensively powdered, but she was kind, and she paused at the table and smiled at Tony and Frank. “Good day,