Blood alone bbwim-3 Page 16

  "This way," Sciafani said, pointing to a plaque that read VIA ATE-NEA. It was a wide street, running straight into the center of town, large buildings with ornate facades on either side. Several of them were bombed out. The debris spilled out into the street, where only a lane wide enough for a single vehicle had been cleared. We walked quickly, not wanting to linger or attract attention by running. A window opened above us, and a frowning gray-haired woman looked down at us and slowly shook her head, as if she found the sight of us in her city pitiful. I felt eyes on us from all around-windows, doorways, alleyways, and rooftops. I shivered in the heat.

  "There's no traffic, no one up and going to work," I said. I glanced at my wristwatch. Just past seven. "Is it Sunday?"

  "No. I think word has spread. They know the Americans are coming."

  The eerie silence was broken by the growl of an engine echoing off the buildings. We eased back into a doorway, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. I heard the vehicle turn onto Via Atenea as the sound grew louder. A stream of shouts in Italian and the hard thuds of boots hitting pavement followed the squealing of ancient brakes. I chanced a quick glance from the doorway. The truck started up, coming toward us with men still in the open back. MVSN.

  "Fascists," I said to Sciafani. "It looks like they're going to drop men off at the other end and search the entire street."

  "Those old men must have informed," Sciafani said. He put his hand on the doorknob to try to open it. As he did, the knob turned slowly and the door creaked open. The gray-haired lady who had looked at us so sadly from the window grabbed me by the sleeve, the strength of her grip a surprise.

  " Entri rapidamente." She pulled me in and Sciafani followed. She put a finger to her lips and shut the door slowly, holding the latch so it wouldn't make a noise.

  " Bastardi di fascista," she whispered, cocking her head toward the street. Then she gave a wheezy little laugh, and her cheeks flushed red.

  She liked this game.

  "Bastards," I said, pointing too. She laughed some more. The truck rumbled by and boots echoed on the empty street. She beckoned us to follow her to the rear of the apartment, and we ended up in her kitchen.

  "Chicago?" she asked me.

  "No. Boston," I said, slow and clear. She shook her head and fired off some Italian to Sciafani.

  "Her brother lives in Chicago. She wanted to know if you know him," Sciafani translated.

  I shook my head. She shrugged and opened a low wooden door that led out to steep, narrow steps in an alleyway. We nodded our thanks and she laughed again, shooing us out like troublesome neighborhood kids. I pulled the Beretta and kept my back against the wall as we edged up the stairs. The stone was cool against my palm, but soft, worn down by centuries of Sicilian hands.

  "Is the church far?" I asked Sciafani.

  "No. We must turn soon and that will take us into the Piazza del Purgatorio and the chiesa. We go into the church, out the side entrance, then up stairs much like these. They will take us to the Duomo."

  "The cathedral, where happiness awaits."

  "Let us hope so, my friend."

  Explosions sounded in the distance as we climbed the stairs. Soft, muffled sounds, thump, thump, thump, followed by ripples of small arms fire. At the top of the steps, I looked back between two buildings and saw plumes of black smoke billowing up from the direction of the harbor. Rangers at work.

  Sciafani led us down a narrow street and up another set of stone steps between two buildings. Wash was hung out to dry on lines strung overhead and from balconies, the clothing limp in the hot early-morning stillness. On the next street, we saw a line of old women, their black shawls pulled tight over their shoulders, bowed heads and stooped shoulders leaning toward the piazza ahead of us. A large church on our right dominated a tiny square. Its great wooden doors were open, swallowing the tiny stream of worshippers.

  "Welcome to purgatory," Sciafani said. "La Chiesa del Purgatorio."

  The bell in the church tower began to ring, as if to announce our arrival. Two American fighter planes zoomed low over the town, the roar of their engines drowning out the bells for a moment, disappearing over rooftops as the bell tolled its last few rings. No one looked up. As I scanned the ornate facade of the church, I wondered why I didn't remember it. Harry and I must have come through here with Nick. Built from blocks of light brown stone, it was decorated with white marble pillars and statues on either side. The bell tower ran up the left side, giving it an oddly unbalanced look. Why didn't I remember it? I looked around the piazza, suddenly nervous. A nun came from a side street and hurried ahead of us; I nearly jumped a foot.

  "Are you all right, Billy?"

  "Yeah, I think so," I said. "I don't remember this, and I think I should."

  "Some memories take longer than others to return. Things that remind you of that incident may be the most difficult memories to recover."

  I stopped to lean against the corner of a building and watch the church entrance. I didn't like this. I felt light-headed and dizzy. I wanted to slump down and close my eyes. Instead I kept them on Sciafani. Was he the one making me nervous?

  "What happened to your parents?" I asked. The words came out without my thinking about them.

  "What? Why do you want to know that now, even if it was any of your business?"

  I licked my lips and looked around again. My mouth was dry and I could feel my heart pounding. Something wasn't right and I had no idea what, so I had to work at the one wrong thing I knew about, and that was Sciafani's story.

  "You told me all about your family in Palermo, and lectured me on how you could only trust family, those closest to you. Then it comes out that your real parents were killed and you were adopted, but you don't want to say anything more about it. Seems strange to me. What are you hiding?"

  If he had told me to go to hell or called me crazy or even socked me on the jaw, I would've known things were on the up-and-up. Those were all normal reactions to some guy sticking his nose too far into your private business. Sciafani didn't do any of those things. He stared at me with wide, startled eyes, like he'd been hit with a two-by-four.

  He blinked a few times and looked away.

  "Come," he said. "We have to pass through the church and leave purgatory behind."

  I had no choice but to follow.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Our footsteps were loud on the stone floor, echoing down the narrow dark interior of the church. Solitary women on their knees fed their rosaries through their fingers like soldiers feeding ammo through a machine gun. Intent on their prayers, they didn't look up as we passed. We didn't belong here, and they ignored us with profound indifference. I had stopped at the entrance to dip my fingers into the holy water and make the sign of the cross. I wasn't exactly a Holy Joe, but I knew what was expected of a good Irish boy in any Catholic church. Sciafani had walked right by.

  You would have taken him for a bum fresh from a couple of days riding the rails and the dagger stuck through his belt gave him a look made more menacing by his dark features and black-whiskered face. My uniform wasn't much cleaner, and the Beretta in my waistband probably didn't give me a peaceful churchgoing appearance either. I was sure Sister Mary Margaret would give me a tongue-lashing whenever I saw her next for going to church not only dirty but armed, no less.

  "This chiesa is famous for these statues of the eight virtues," Sciafani said to me as we passed through the nave, pointing at the four statues on each side. "Charity, Love, I forget the others." He was playing the happy native tour guide, as if the exchange outside had never happened.

  "Justice," I said, pointing to the one holding scales.

  "Bah! In this world, justice is hard to find."

  A priest swept by us, his long black cassock dusting the floor as he walked. He glanced at us sourly and put a finger to pursed lips, more offended by our voices than our attire and armament. Someone began playing the organ, the energetic pumping echoing almost as loudly as the Gloria Patri itse
lf. Exiting by a side door, we left the darkness behind and stepped out into the bright sun.

  "You're not religious?" I asked Sciafani. He shrugged, which seemed to be the most common reply to any question asked in Sicily.

  "Do you get on your knees and pray to Cristu?" he asked me, taking the steep stairs that led directly up from the plaza.

  "Yeah, I go to church. Pretty often, when I'm home."

  "I have no wish to beg on my knees, to whisper words after a priest to beg crumbs from heaven. You may as well beg a rich man for his land."

  "You wouldn't pray for an end to the war?"

  Sciafani broke his long stride and turned on me, his smoldering anger barely contained as he punched his finger at my chest. "Pray? To whom? It would take a giant to end this war, not the pale Jesus in the church paintings. He wasn't even much of a man, if you ask me. He had no wife, and gave up carpentry to go around giving speeches and begging for food. Sicilians revere his mother, Mary, more than him. Or our Sicilian saints, like Saint Lucia, who saved Catania from Mount Etna's eruption. Stopping lava-now that miracle I would get down on my knees and pray for. But where is this Jesus now that we need the great Son of God? Where is he since he chased some fish into a net and got himself crucified?"

  He made a trembling fist and held it to my face, his eyes looking beyond mine, to some distant pain. I took his fist in both my hands and pulled it to my chest, recalling how I used to pray as a child.

  "Who was it, Enrico? Your father? Your mother?"

  His eyes widened in rage, then compressed as he worked to hold back tears.

  "All of them, damn you!"

  He pulled his hand from my grip violently, throwing me back hard against the stone wall. I stumbled a few steps, and then had to take the stairs two at a time to catch up with him.

  "What do you mean, all of them? You spoke of your father as if he were still alive in Palermo. What's the truth?" He stopped again, the look of rage that had played across his features gone, replaced by weariness. He let out a breath and shook his head as he smiled, as you might at a small child who kept asking questions beyond his understanding. He put his hand on my shoulder gently.

  "Why don't you pray to Christu, Billy? Ask him for the truth. Who better to tell you? Come, we are almost to the Duomo." That struck him as funny, I guess. He dropped his hand and climbed the steps, laughing as he went, the echoes rattling in the narrow passageway between stone buildings until it sounded like a hysterical mob on our heels.

  Sciafani slowed as we reached the top of the stairs, gesturing to the wall of pink stone in front of us. "The Duomo," he said, beckoning me on. We turned left and walked along the south wall of the cathedral. His outburst had tempered my earlier sense of suspicion, replacing it with satisfaction at hitting my target. I still didn't understand him, but at least I knew now that there was a story behind his evasions. The emotion with which he had turned on me made that clear.

  It was one of the little rules my dad had drummed into my head. When something doesn't feel right, find out why. You'd be surprised, he used to tell me, how many times people get that little gnawing sense of something wrong and ignore it. A guy says something that contradicts what he said an hour ago, and you figure, I must've heard him wrong. People want everything to fit in with what they know, and they twist the facts to make things match. The trick-he told me a couple of dozen times-is to recognize that thread of wrongness and pull at it until you unravel the truth. And to keep at it until you do.

  He never told me to pray to Jesus for it.

  At the west end of the cathedral we turned and went up the steps to the main door. It wasn't a fancy cathedral like the ones you see in pictures. It wasn't even as nice as the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, with its tall stained-glass windows, bright red doors, and massive bell tower. This bell tower was short, squat, and looked like they'd stopped working on it long before my granddaddy was born. The walls were soft limestone, the blocks uneven and worn, crumbling away in places. Carvings in the stone were unrecognizable, hazy with blurred edges, like my memory. The front was plain, nothing but a single round window above the door, a cross set in the stained glass the only decoration. But from the top of the steps, you couldn't beat the view. Across and beyond the rooftops of Agrigento, to the south, acres of ancient ruins lay as they had for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

  To the west, new ruins were being made in Porto Empedocle and all along the coast road. Smoke filled the sky, showing all the variations of battle. Furious, dark, billowing clouds from the port, maybe an oil storage depot on fire. Gray smoke from buildings, caught on the wind and drifting toward us on the breeze off the sea. Here and there a pinpoint of flame and greasy smoke as a smashed vehicle consumed fuel and flesh. Along the coast road, dust and smoke from skirmishes produced a hazy glimmer in the harsh sun. Men were dying. We turned our backs and opened the door to the Duomo.

  Standing in the doorway, I saw it was lighter inside than I had expected. Wooden crossbeams painted in bright colors with scrollwork, flowers, and dancing angels gave the interior a cheery look, compared to the dark and dank church in purgatory. This looked like a place you might actually find some happiness. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the crumpled silk handkerchief, cool to the touch, and wondered whom I would end up giving it to, or if it would be taken from me. I shivered.

  " Carne? " a small voice asked. I nearly jumped, spooked by my own thoughts, and saw three children standing behind us, two little girls and a boy. He was the oldest, maybe eight or nine.

  " Carne? " he said again, looking to Sciafani this time.

  "Doesn't that mean meat?" I said, remembering a few Italian words I'd learned from Al DeAngelo that weren't swear words.

  "Yes, but they use it to mean food. They honor us by asking for meat, since only rich men could give such a gift to a beggar." He shrugged, turning from them slightly, speaking with his body what he thought of them.

  " Carne? " one of the little girls asked. I wondered if she thought we were debating how much meat to give them or what kind. Beefsteak or chicken? We had eaten Italian rations last night and I still had one crumpled packet in my shirt pocket. I pulled it out, the white wrapping dirty and ripped, but the words BISCOTTI DOLCI still stood out. Sweet biscuits.

  " Nessuna carne," I said. " Mi dispiace." I figured I should practice apologizing in Italian, and wondered how many languages I would learn to express sorrow in.

  " Grazie," the boy said, putting his arms around the girls' shoulders and shepherding them away. The little girl who had taken the biscuits held them to her chest and looked at me over her shoulder, her dark eyes locked onto mine as her brother led her down the steps. An antiaircraft gun on the hill behind us began firing, and she flinched at the noise, but held her gaze as she disappeared down the steep steps.

  A pair of fighter planes zoomed overhead, British Spitfires, twisting and turning to avoid antiaircraft fire from the ridge behind the church. Straightening, they went into a shallow dive, racing across the city, their machine guns chattering at some target along the road. We couldn't see anything but the two fighters pulling up and away, arcing in the sky, gleaming in the sunlight over the Mediterranean. A puff of smoke appeared where they had strafed. This far away, it seemed inconsequential, like it must to those pilots, so high in the air. I wondered if they had ever killed a man up close, felt his blood on their hands. Or did they dream of blood at night, safe in comfortable beds?

  I went into the church, glad to leave the ringside view. I didn't like the view up close, and I didn't like it from a distance either. There was too much dead and empty air, too much of everything between the living and the dead. Distance, memories, dreams, desires. Soldiers and civilians were losing their dreams of life down there in those little puffs of smoke, losing everything to the distant rat-tat-tat that almost sounded like a woodpecker at work on the old dead tree near the bird feeder in our backyard. They were dying amid screams and terror and noise so loud the ears of the liv
ing would ring for hours after.

  There was so much space between us, so much of nothing, that there was room enough for the memory of my mother feeding birds, and how happy the sound of the woodpecker's beak against dead wood made her. She'd stand at the kitchen window, up on her tiptoes, straining to see that tree. Tat-tat-tat.

  I couldn't look. Instead, I went to find happiness, following Sciafani into the church. He seemed more troubled by the children than the battle. Then again, the kids were right here.

  "Look, a Caravaggio," he said, pointing to a painting. It was of a baby, but the canvas was so dark I couldn't tell anything more. The church door shut behind me, the distant sounds of battle muffled by the ancient wood.

  "Is he famous, like Michelangelo?"

  "Yes, my friend," Sciafani said, laughing. "He is famous. There would be carne for all the beggar children of Agrigento if the church sold that one! But don't worry, priests will feast their eyes on it over the centuries while the bambini starve. They always have."

  "So it's been a while since you've been to services?" I said, trying to joke him out of his foul mood.

  "Not since my parents…" He let the sentence drift off. "Not since my parents," he said more firmly.

  We walked to the ornate altar, tiers of rose-colored marble rising to support a statue of Mary holding her baby.

  "See, Billy? We Sicilians worship the Mother of Christ, the mother of us all. But we do not pay so much attention to her son. He should have respected her more and not drawn all that trouble down on the family. As soon as he was born, they had to flee to Egypt!" He shook his head dismissively.

  Sciafani wandered off to look at the other paintings along the main wall. I was glad not to have to listen to him rant and rave about the church and paintings and mothers. Something was eating at him and it was ready to boil over, which would have been fine, except I couldn't afford to have him go off his rocker right here, right now, while I was searching for happiness. Where would Saint Felice be, and what would happen when I found him? I peered down the corridor that led off to each side of the altar. The transept, I thought, remembering my brief career as an altar boy back in Boston. It was an honor, my mom kept telling me, and I guess it was, but one I'd been eager to pass up. Getting up earlier than everyone else to prepare for Sunday services wasn't high on my list at that age. Every once in a while, though, as the organ played and I felt the eyes of the congregation following me as I carried the heavy candle to the altar, I had felt holy, deep inside. There was something about being up on the chancel, dressed in my small black cassock, that set me apart from everyday life, and I'd liked that. I would forget about my alarm clock and the lonely early morning walk to church, and I'd feel sorry for all those poor people in the pews who weren't part of what we were doing, who had to follow along as I alone carried the gifts of bread and wine for the priest to work his magic on. I guess the church knew what Mussolini knew, that blood alone moves the wheels, even if the blood was made miraculously from wine every Sunday.