The Sicilian

future.

At that moment the door of the house was being opened by Guiliano's father, and the Maresciallo took the old man roughly by the arm and thrust him out into the street with a shouted order to wait there.

A Maresciallo of the Italian carabinieri is the highest ranking noncommissioned officer of the National Police force and usually is the commander of a small town detachment. As such he is an important member of the local community and treated with the same respect as the local Mayor and priest of the parish. So he was not expecting the greeting from Guiliano's mother when she barred his way and spit on the ground in front of him to show her contempt. He and his three men had to force their way into the house and search it while being scathingly abused and cursed by Guiliano's mother. Everyone was taken out into the street to be questioned; the neighboring houses emptied of their women and men who also verbally abused the police.

When the search of the house proved fruitless, the Maresciallo attempted to question the inhabitants. Guiliano's father was astonished. 'Do you think I would inform on my own son?' he asked the Maresciallo, and a great roar of approval came from the crowd in the streets. The Maresciallo ordered the Guiliano family back into their house.

In the shadow of their alley, Pisciotta said to Guiliano, 'Lucky for them your mother doesn't have our weapons.' But Turi didn't answer. The blood had rushed to his head. It took an enormous effort to control himself. The Maresciallo lashed out with his club and hit a man in the crowd who dared to protest the rough treatment of Guiliano's parents. Two other carabinieri began grabbing citizens of Montelepre at random and throwing them into the waiting truck, kicking and clubbing them on their way, ignoring their cries of fear and protest.

Suddenly there was one man standing alone on the street facing the carabinieri. He lunged at the Maresciallo. A shot rang out, and the man fell to the cobblestones. From one of the houses a woman began to scream and then she ran out and threw her body over her fallen husband. Turi Guiliano recognized her; she was an old friend of his family who always brought his mother freshly baked Easter cake.

Turi tapped Pisciotta on the shoulder and whispered, 'Follow me,' and started running down the narrow crooked streets toward the central square of the town, at the other end of the Via Bella.

Pisciotta yelled fiercely, 'What the hell are you doing?' but then fell silent. For he suddenly knew exactly what Turi had in mind. The truck full of prisoners would have to go down the Via Bella to turn around and make its run back to the Bellampo Barracks.

As he ran down the dark parallel street, Turi Guiliano felt invisible, godlike. He knew the enemy would never dream, could never even imagine, what he was doing, that they thought he was running for safety in the mountains. He felt a wild elation. They would learn they could not raid his mother's home with impunity, they would think twice before doing it again. They could not again shoot a man in cold blood. He would make them show respect for his neighbors and his family.

He reached the far side of the square, and in the light of its single streetlamp he could see the police van blocking the entrance into the Via Bella. As if he could have been caught in such a trap. What could they have been thinking of? Was that a sample of official cleverness? He switched to another side street to bring him to the back entrance of the church that dominated the square, Pisciotta following him. Inside, they both vaulted the altar rail and then both stopped for a fraction of a second on the holy stage where long ago they had performed as altar boys and served their priest while he was giving the people of Montelepre Sunday Mass and Communion. Holding their guns at the ready they genuflected and crossed themselves clumsily; for a moment the power of the wax statues of Christ crowned with thorns, the gilded chalky blue-robed Virgin Marys, the batteries of saints blunted their lust for battle. Then they were running up the short aisle to the great oaken door that gave a field of fire to the square. And there they knelt again to prepare their weapons.

The van blocking the Via Bella backed off to let the truck with the arrested men enter the square to make its circle and go back up the street. At that moment Turi Guiliano pushed open the church door and said to Pisciotta, 'Fire over their heads.' At the same moment he fired his machine pistol into the blocking van, aiming at the tires and the engine. Suddenly the square flamed with light as the engine blew up and the van caught fire. The two carabinieri in the front seat tumbled out like loose-jointed puppets, their surprise not giving their bodies time to tighten against the shock. Beside him Pisciotta was firing his rifle at the cab of the truck holding the prisoners. Turi Guiliano saw the driver leap out and fall still. The other armed carabinieri jumped out and Pisciotta fired again. The second policeman went down. Turi turned to Pisciotta to reproach him but suddenly the stained glass windows of the church shattered with machine gun fire and the colored bits scattered on the church floor like rubies. Turi realized that there was no longer any possibility of mercy. That Aspanu was right. They must kill or be killed.

Guiliano pulled Pisciotta's arm and ran back through the church and out the back door and through the dark crooked streets of Montelepre. He knew that tonight there was no hope of helping the prisoners to escape. They slipped through the final wall of the town over the open fields and kept running until they were safely into the rising slopes covered with huge white stones. Dawn was breaking when they reached the top of Monte d'Ora in the Cammarata Mountains.

Over a thousand years ago Spartacus had hidden his slave army here and led them out to fight the Roman legions. Standing on the top of this Monte d'Ora watching the sun come radiantly alive, Turi Guiliano was filled with youthful glee that he had escaped his enemies. He would never obey a fellow human being again. He would choose who should live and who should die, and there was no doubt in his mind that all he would do would be for the glory and freedom of Sicily, for good and not for evil. That he would only strike for the cause of justice, to help the poor. That he would win every battle, that he would win the love of the oppressed.

He was twenty years old.

CHAPTER 7

Don Croce Malo was born in the village of Villaba, a little mudhole he was to make prosperous and famous all through Sicily. It was not ironic, to Sicilians, that he sprang from a religious family who groomed him for priesthood in the Holy Catholic Church, that his first name had originally been Crocefisso, a religious name given only by the most pious parents. Indeed, as a slender youth he was forced to play the part of Christ in those religious plays put on in celebration of Holy Easter and was acclaimed for his marvelous air of piety.

But when he grew to manhood at the turn of the century, it was clear that Croce Malo had difficulty accepting any authority other than himself. He smuggled, he extorted, he stole, and finally, worst of all, he impregnated a young girl of the village, an innocent Magdalene in the plays. He then refused to marry her, claiming they had both been carried away with the religious fervor of the play, and therefore he should be forgiven.

The girl's family found this explanation too subtle to accept and demanded matrimony or death. Croce Malo was too proud to marry a girl so dishonored and fled to the mountains. After a year as a bandit, he had the good fortune to make contact with the Mafia.

'Mafia,' in Arabic, means a place of sanctuary, and the word took its place in the Sicilian language when the Saracens ruled the country in the tenth century. Throughout history, the people of Sicily were oppressed mercilessly by the Romans, the Papacy, the Normans, the French, the Germans, and the Spanish. Their governments enslaved the poor working class, exploiting their labor, raping their women, murdering their leaders. Even the rich did not escape. The Spanish Inquisition of the Holy Catholic Church stripped them of their wealth for being heretics. And so the 'Mafia' sprang up as a secret society of avengers. When the royal courts refused to take action against a Norman noble who raped a farmer's wife, a band of peasants assassinated him. When a police chief tortured some petty thief with the dreaded cassetta, that police chief was killed. Gradually the strongest-willed of the peasants and the poor formed themselves into an organized society which had the support of the people and in effect became a second and more powerful government. When there was a wrong to be redressed, no one ever went to the official police, they went to the leader of the local Mafia, who mediated the problem.

The greatest crime a Sicilian could commit was to give any information of any kind to the authorities