Page 104 of Mafia Kings: Valentino

“What’s with your servant girl?” I asked Isabella.

Isabella glanced behind us. “Ludavica? She’s been with me since we were children. Her mother worked here, too, until she died a few years ago. Ludavica’s my best friend in the whole world.”

“Oh. Well, that’s nice.”

Isabella flashed a smile behind her at Ludavica, then turned to look off into the distance. “If I didn’t have her here, I think I’d go insane.”

I 100%, totally and completely understood what she meant…

SinceIwas starting to go insane here, too.

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As it got close to sunset, Isabella said she was tired, so she went back to the house with Ludavica and all the women.

Three of the foot soldiers went with them, but the fourth stayed with me.

As a guide?

A bodyguard?

A jailer?

Who knew. Maybe all three.

He was dour, that was for sure. He had a particularly bad male version of Resting Bitch Face – ‘Resting Bastard Face,’ I guess, with a grimace like he’d just bit into a lemon.

He looked like he was in his late 30s, but when I asked him, he said he was only 27.

Life was hard in Sicily, apparently.

But the weather was great. It had been around 85 degrees Fahrenheit in Palermo, but up here in the mountains, it was in the mid-70s.

Since there was nothing better to do – no phone, no internet, no TV, no nothin’ – I decided to go exploring on my own.

Well… with Resting Bastard Face along for the ride, anyway.

The ‘gardens’ I’d walked through with Isabella (and 3000 of her female in-laws) had mostly been a bunch of different plants the kitchen used for spice and herbs, along with fruit trees and some ornamental bushes with red berries. Everything had the scraggly look of plants that could thrive in an arid environment, which Sicily definitely was.

I left the gardens and headed out into the rolling hills.

You could literally see for miles. Lots of craggy grey boulders poking up out of patches of green; the rest was dry brown fields.

“Do they grow something here?” I asked RBF (short for Resting Bastard Face).

“Grain,” he said dourly.

Talkative guy.

From far away, I heard the clanking of cowbells. A half-mile away, maybe more, a bunch of them dotted one of the hillsides, grazing amongst the boulders.

In the far distance – quite a few miles away – there were a couple of small villages: one to the east, and one to the south. I doubted more than 500 people lived in either one. I could only tell they were east and south because the sun was setting in the west, a ball of golden light disappearing behind the clouds on the horizon.

Between the villages and Don Vicari’s, there was the occasional crumbling stone building with a collapsed roof and walls falling in.

But there was one stone building pretty close to the property, maybe half a mile away, that was in excellent shape. It was old, yes, but it still had shutters over the windows, the wooden door was closed, and the roof was obviously well-maintained.

Thinking it was a horse stable or something, I turned to RBF. “What’s that over there?”

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