The Sicilian

ceiling by glass wires. Some of the bodies were seated on chairs, some stood against the wall. Some were propped into glass boxes like costumed dolls.

Guiliano lay down on a dank stone of the catacombs and used a coffin as his pillow. He studied all these Sicilians dead for hundreds of years. There was a knight of the Royal Court in a blue silk ruffled uniform, a helmet on his head, a sword cane in his hand. A courtier, foppish in the French style, with white wig and high-heeled boots. There was a Cardinal in his red robes, an archbishop in his miter. There were court beauties whose golden gowns looked now like spider webs strangling the mummified shrunken bodies as if they were flies. There was a young maiden in white gloves and white frilly nightdress enclosed in a glass box.

Guiliano slept badly the two nights he spent there. As who would not? he thought. These were the great men and women of Sicily for the three or four last centuries, and they thought they could escape the worms in this fashion. The pride and vanity of the rich, the darlings of fate. Much better to die in the road like La Venera's husband.

But what really kept Guiliano awake was a nagging worry. How had Don Croce escaped the attack on his life earlier that week? Guiliano knew that the operation had been perfectly planned. He had brooded on how to do it ever since he had learned the truth about the massacre at the Portella della Ginestra. The Don was so well guarded that a chink had to be found in his defenses. Guiliano had decided his best chance was when the Don felt secure in the heavily guarded Hotel Umberto of Palermo. The band had a spy in the hotel, one of the waiters. He gave the Don's schedule, the deployment of the guards. With this intelligence Guiliano was sure his attack would succeed.

He had mustered thirty men to rendezvous with him in Palermo. He had known of Michael Corleone's visit and lunch with the Don, and so he waited until late afternoon when the report reached him that Michael had left. Then twenty of his men had mounted a frontal assault on the hotel to draw guards off from the garden. A few moments later he and his remaining ten men had planted an explosive charge against the garden wall and blown a hole in it. Guiliano led the charge through the hole. There were only five guards left in the garden; Guiliano shot one and the other four fled. Guiliano rushed into the Don's suite but it was empty. And it had struck him as strange that it was unguarded. Meanwhile the other detachment of his band had forced their way through the defense barrier and joined up with him. They had searched the rooms and corridors along the way and found nothing. The Don's huge bulk made it impossible for him to move quickly, so only one conclusion could be drawn. The Don had departed from the hotel shortly after Michael left. And now it occurred to Guiliano for the first time that Don Croce had been warned about the attack.

It was too bad, Guiliano thought. It would have been a glorious last stroke, besides removing his most dangerous enemy. What ballads would have been sung if he had found Don Croce in that sunlit garden. But there would be another day. He would not stay forever in America.

On the third morning, the Cappuccini monk, his body and face almost as shrunken as the mummies in his charge, brought a message from Pisciotta. It read, 'In the house of Charlemagne.' Guiliano understood it immediately. Zu Peppino, the master carter of Castelvetrano, who had helped Guiliano in the hijacking of Don Croce's trucks and had been a secret ally of his band ever since, had three carts and six donkeys. All three of his carts had been painted with the legends of the great Emperor, and as boys, Turi and Aspanu had called his home the house of Charlemagne. The time of the meeting had already been set.

That night, his final night in Sicily, Guiliano made his way to Castelvetrano. Outside of Palermo he picked up some shepherds who were secret members of his band and used them as an armed escort. They made their way to Castelvetrano with such ease that a suspicion flickered in Guiliano's mind. The town looked too open. He dismissed his bodyguards, who slipped away into the night. Then he made his way to a little stone house outside of Castelvetrano whose courtyard held three painted carts, now all bearing the legends from his own life. This was the house of Zu Peppino.

Zu Peppino did not seem surprised to see him. He put down the brush with which he had been painting the slat of one of his carts. The he locked the door and said to Guiliano, 'We have trouble. You attract the carabinieri like a dead mule attracts flies.'

Guiliano felt a little shock of adrenaline. 'Are they Luca's Special Force?' he asked.

'Yes,' Zu Peppino said. 'They are tucked out of sight, not in the streets patrolling. I spotted some of their vehicles on the road when I came back from work. And some carters tell me they saw other vehicles. We thought they were setting up traps for members of your band, but we never suspected it might be you. You never get this far south, so far away from your mountains.'

Guiliano wondered how the carabinieri could have known about the rendezvous. Had they trailed Aspanu? Were Michael Corleone and his people indiscreet? Or was there an informer? In any case, he could not meet Pisciotta in Castelvetrano. But they had a fallback meeting place if one of them did not show up at the rendezvous here.

'Thanks for the warning,' Guiliano said. 'Keep an eye out for Pisciotta in town and tell him. And when you take your cart to Montelepre, pay my mother a visit and tell her I am safely in America.'

Zu Peppino said, 'Allow an old man to embrace you.' And he kissed Guiliano on the cheek. 'I never believed you could help Sicily, nobody can, nobody ever could, not even Garibaldi, not even that windbag Il Duce. Now if you like I can put my mules to a cart and carry you wherever you want to go.'

Guiliano's rendezvous time with Pisciotta had been for midnight. It was now only ten. He had deliberately come in early to scout the ground. And he knew that the rendezvous with Michael Corleone was for dawn. The fallback meeting place was at least a two-hour fast walk from Castelvetrano. But it was better to walk than use Zu Peppino. He thanked the old man and slipped out into the night.

The fallback meeting place was the famous ancient Greek ruins called the Acropolis of Selinus. South of Castelvetrano, near Mazzara del Vallo, the ruins stood on a desolate plain near the sea, ending where the sea cliffs began to rise. Selinus had been buried by an earthquake before Christ was born, but a row of marble columns and architraves still stood. Or rather had been raised by excavators. There was still the main thoroughfare, though now reduced to rubble by the skeletons of ancient buildings lining its way. There was a temple with its roof matted with vines and showing holes like a skull and stone columns exhausted and gray with centuries of age. The acropolis itself, the fortified center of ancient Greek cities, was, as usual, built on the highest ground, and so these ruins looked down on the stark countryside below.

The scirocco, a terrible desert wind, had been blowing all day. Now, at night, so close to the sea, it sent fog rolling through the ruins. Guiliano, weary of his long forced march, detoured around to the sea cliffs so he could look down and spy out the land.

It was a sight so beautiful that he forgot for a moment the danger he was in. The temple of Apollo had fallen in on itself in a twisted mass of columns. Other ruined temples gleamed in the moonlight – without walls, just columns, strands of roof and one fortress wall with what had been a barred window high up, now blackly empty, the moon shining through it. Lower down in what had been the city proper, below the acropolis, one column stood alone, surrounded by flat ruins, that in its thousands of years had never fallen. This was the famous 'Il Fuso della Vecchia,' the Old Woman's Spindle. Sicilians were so used to the monuments of the Greeks scattered over the island that they treated them with affectionate contempt. It was only foreigners who made a fuss.

And the foreigners had raised the twelve great columns that stood before him now. Their grandeur was Herculean, but behind them was only the panorama of ruins. At the foot of those twelve columns, abreast like soldiers fronting their commander full face, was a platform of stone steps that seemed to have grown out of the ground. Guiliano sat down on the top step, his back resting against one of the columns. He reached under his coat and unhooked the machine pistol and the lupara and put them one stone step below him. Fog swirled through the ruins, but he knew he would hear anyone who approached over the rubble and that he could easily see any enemies before they could see him.

He leaned back against one of the columns, glad to be resting, his body sagging with fatigue. The July moon seemed to pass over the gray-white columns and rest against the cliffs that led to the sea. And across the sea was America. And in America was Justina and their child to be born. Soon he would be safe and the last seven years of his banditry would be a dream. For a moment he wondered what kind of a life that would be, if he could ever be happy not living in Sicily. He smiled. One day he would come back and surprise them all. He sighed with fatigue and unlaced his boots and slipped his feet out of them. He took off his socks and his feet welcomed the touch of cold stone. He reached into his pocket and took out the two prickly pears and their sweet night-cooled