Made in Sicily (english edition) E-Book

Vittorio Schiraldi

• Herausgeber: Vittorio Schiraldi
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Many years after the publication of Baciamo le mani (I Kiss Your Hands) and La mafia degli occhi blu (Blue-eyed Mafia), Vittorio Schiraldi returns to the theme of the twilight of a boss, in whom it is easy to recognize the figure of Bernardo Provenzano, considered to have been the “Boss of all bosses” in Sicily. Schiraldi portrays the capo in his human dimension, inside the hideout where the Boss has shut himself up for more than thirty years in a voluntary imprisonment, from which Provenzano, perhaps unconsciously, dreams of escaping. He suspects that his long survival has made him an inconvenience for the many people who would like to see him dead. This suspicion slowly mutates into the knowledge that he has paid too high a price for the power that others now want to wrest from him; a suspicion accompanied bu the certainty that he no longer has a future. Schiraldi recounts all this in a language touched with irony and wit, at times surreal – perhaps the most appropriate way of showing the contradictions of the mafia’s world and the world of a personage who has paradoxically outlived his time, while continuing to leave a mark on our own. The novel surges out of this background: constructed like a detective story, charged with rhythm and suspense; clearly illustrating the absurd tenacity of the Sicilian boss, whose behavior at times verges on the grotesque (not unlike The Sopranos), making him a survivor isolated in a criminal reality that is now in total transformation.

Leseprobe

Title | Made in Sicily

Author | Vittorio Schiraldi

Originally publisher | Marlin Editore Srl - 2007

English translation | Ann McGarrell - [email protected] - 2008

E-book publisher | Vittorio Schiraldi self publisher - 2011

E-book editor | Sergio Covelli - Pecorenerecords - www.pecorenerecords.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED | © Copyright 2011 Vittorio Schiraldi

No parts of this book may be reproduced without the prior consent of the author.

Vittorio Schiraldi

www.vittorio.schiraldi.it

[email protected]

Realizzazione e-book: Sergio Covelli - Pecorenerecords

Vittorio Schiraldi

Made in Sicily

1

The dead man, as dead men go, was seriously dead. You don’t end up in a walnut box by mistake when somebody empties all the cartridges a Browning can hold into you; and don Ciccio Scalise had taken every one of them.

And so the dead man, now that he was in a condition that only required him to resemble himself, lay motionless, with folded arms, in a first class casket, embellished along its sides with bright gilt laurels. It was lined with velvet padding, like a jewel box, protecting the departed from noises that were never going to bother him again.

“Do you like it?” asked the funeral director, who has just been introduced to me as a person of respect.

“Fine casket,” I approved.

“Not to boast, but we’ve always taken care of the Scalise family. And I have to say: nobody’s ever complained about our work.”

“Would they’d be in any condition to complain?” I asked, but my irony was lost on the coffin salesman, who meanwhile had pulled out a handkerchief to polish a brass knob.

“Our motto is comfort and speed. We’re always the first ones there,” he confided.

“It can’t always be easy for you to get there at the right moment, especially when these things tend to be, well…improvised.”

“That’s true. You need to have a nose for it. You have to have a feel for which way the wind’s blowing, where the next blow’s coming from….”

“I can see that,” I said, and for the second time I had the sensation that any attempt at sarcasm was wasted on this audience.

Now a fly, seeking an impossible passage, had started teasing the dead man’s cotton-plugged nostrils. A bystander with the face of a killer made a grimace of disgust.

“And to think that if a fly ever dared to come anywhere near don Ciccio ‘s nose, he used to….” He growled, leaving the sentence unfinished, heavy with resentment.

“See, once you’re dead, even the flies take advantage of you, ‘ commented another man who wore a similar assassin’s face, even though he’d been introduced to me as an onorevole; a member of Parliament.

He turned to me with an interrogative look, but I didn’t answer. I knew enough about Mafia funerals to realize that in certain circumstances it’s best not to take a position. However, I was also sure that, out of respect, at least, I had to offer some reaction, so I limited myself to sighing, with appropriate feeling, a painful “Yeah….”

I don’t like going to funerals. Especially when there’s the risk of getting entangled with certain persons, and then not being able to get away from them. Alive, preferably. But this time, I only happened to be there; purely by chance, and maybe at the worst moment.

During one week in Palermo, three old bosses had been killed, and it was the general opinion that this was the beginning of a new war; one that tasted like a vendetta carried out against the Corleonese families twenty years after they’d won supremacy.

They’d shot the first one while he was playing at Sferracavallo; then they got the second one with a bomb in his toilet, just as he pulled the chain in what would be his last meaningful act. The third – the aforementioned don Ciccio Scalise, in fact – was brought down by a hit man disguised as a nurse, or maybe he really was a nurse, who had penetrated the urology section of the local hospital and discharged the Browning into don Ciccio’s belly while the old man was waiting for a prostate examination.