Page 77 of Mafia Kings: Valentino

I just stumbled away from the door, stunned…

And then burst into tears as I ran for my room.

27

Valentino

The pilot announced over the intercom that we’d be landing in Palermo in 15 minutes. Between the crackling of the speaker and his Sicilian accent, I could barely understand him.

Niccolo came over, sat down opposite me, and buckled up.

“You can literally sitanywhereelse in the plane,” I snapped, gesturing at the empty seats around us.

“Not if I want to talk to you.”

“Well,Idon’t want to talk toYOU.”

“Good, you can just listen. That’ll make it shorter.”

“Niccolo – ”

“Shut up. This might be our last opportunity to talk by ourselves, and you need to know what you’re walking into.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean, ‘what I’m walking into’?”

“Sicilians aren’t the same as other families in theCosa Nostra,and you haven’t been around any of them long enough to know the differences.”

“Papa was Sicilian,” I pointed out.

“Nonni and Nonna were from the old country, yes,” Niccolo said, using the words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother.’ “But they had Papa after they came over. He was raised in Tuscany, and he married a girl from Florence. He was always more Tuscan than he was Sicilian.”

“But – ”

“I need you to be quiet and listen, alright? We don’t have much time.”

“If it was so fucking important, why didn’t you talk to me before?”

“Because you were being a snot-nosed little punk.”

“Fuckyou.”

“Valentino, this is a direct order from yourconsigliere,and it holds the same weight as an order from your Don:shut the fuck up and listen to me.”

Niccolo wasn’t playing around.

I grumbled, but I didn’t say anything else.

“Sicily was conquered repeatedly throughout the last 2500 years. The Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the French, the Spanish – every few hundred years, the island changed hands.

“This led to a streak of fatalism amongst Sicilians. They’re a proud people, but they’re aconqueredpeople. There’s a sort of… underlying attitude that there’s nothing they can do about their fates.

“That’s the environment that gave rise to theCosa Nostra.The mafia was able to flourish because it was a bunch of men who saidFuck itand decided to take control of their destinies – and everyone around them just accepted it as inevitable, something they couldn’t do anything about. That is, until theCosa Nostrafinally took it too far, the civilians had enough, and the cops and judges started jailing everybody in the 1980s.

“The most far-sighted families of theCosa Nostrastarted spreading into the rest of Italy long before that. They were secretive about it, but they built their power bases outside Sicily.”

“Like Nonni,” I said.

“Like Nonni,” Niccolo agreed. “And the other families in the Council, too.

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