The next day, there were fewer Carabinieri in the hotel and no one would've ever guessed a mafia boss had been murdered on the top floor two nights before. The sky was a perfect blue except for where Mount Etna still spewed out black smoke. But now everyone was carrying on like normal, as though it were usual to have a volcano in the background rumbling and carrying on.
Apparently the eruption hadn't damaged too much. Not yet, anyway. Not like last year. I reckoned the mountain could have been mad because someone had killed Franco.
We had to go to another amphitheater. Every town in Sicily must have had one. Why we had to check them all out, I didn't know. They were all a bit the same, except with this one you could see a smoking, snow-capped volcano through a Roman arch. Even I took three photos of that.
There was a bunch of school kids wandering round with daypacks. One boy yelled at us, "Americano?" The boy with him yelled, "No! English." He pointed to my Manchester United shirt.
"Australian, actually." I replied in my posh voice.
They laughed. "Si, l'australiano." Then they began hopping about like kangaroos.
What was it with the kangaroos? Just then, I noticed two guys wearing jeans and black shirts behind the school kids. They didn't look like tourists; they looked out of place. Had I seen them before?
Then Charlie challenged me to a race around the amphitheater and I forgot about them. He was dying to beat me, because I'd beaten him at every one so far. He might've been a better runner, but I was way better at jumping from one pillar to another. It was lucky for me the amphitheater had lots of gaps between the pillars. I said we had to start right at the top, away from the tourists. Charlie grumbled because he didn't like heights. That was too bad for him. I wasn't complaining about his longer legs.
We ran up to the top, near a bunch of Germans who were getting a lecture on architectural features. Like anyone cared. They seemed more interested in the view, because there was a real good view of the sea and Mount Etna from up there. Even before Charlie and me started to race, I knew I had it won. There were so many gaps and so many jumps. "Ready, set, go!" I shouted.
Charlie led for the first bit. That was because we didn't have to jump. Then came a whole row of jumping from one pillar to another. By the third pillar I'd overtaken him. Charlie's problem was that he thought too much. I just jumped like I was on the ground, so I was way ahead by the time we reached the end of the pillars.
Then I had to stop because a couple of guys wearing jeans and black shirts were standing right in my way. They had a picture of two crossed swords on their shirts - like a logo. Who did they think they were? Samurai warriors? Didn't they know they were in Italy? Going round them would've been easy except one of them grabbed me under the arm and snarled at me in Italian.
"Hey!" Charlie yelled at him.
Then the other one grabbed Charlie. I screamed at them, "What do you want us for?"
"Quiet!" He pushed me in the back and forced me down the steps to the floor of the amphitheater.
Charlie was next to me. We swapped worried glances. Whatever they wanted, it couldn't be good. I looked around for Dad and Mom, but couldn't see them. They were never around when we needed them. The black-shirt guys forced us out the back of the amphitheater to a dungeon, which must've gone underneath the amphitheater. They pushed us in and closed the iron gate behind us.
When I heard the clang of the gate shut, I began to sweat. What did they want?
They pushed us against a wall and one said, "You know who kill Petruzzelli?"
"WHAT?" I stared at him in disbelief. "As if!" A weird thought entered my head. We could be on one of those crazy reality TV shows. These guys could've been asked to terrify a couple of tourists. I looked around for a hidden camera, but it was a bit hard to see anything because it was pretty dark.
"You talk to Carabinieri. What about?"
Charlie answered slowly. "They asked us why Mr. Petruzzelli spoke to us in the hotel. When he found out we were from Australia, he asked us to send him stamps."
"Stamps?"
Charlie did a whole charade of sticking a stamp on a letter and posting it. He looked like a total loser, but the black-shirt guy understood. I began to breathe more slowly. They only seemed interested in getting information.
"Carabinieri tell you how he die?"
"No," Charlie and me said and shook our heads at the same time.
"Oh," he replied. "You stay in his hotel?"
We nodded.
"Franco Petruzzelli kept black book. You must get for me."
We nodded. Disagreeing with him didn't seem like an option. Every hair on my body stood up. There was a noise at the gate. I turned to see a bunch of the school kids - there were seven of them. Words fired in each direction. They way outnumbered the two black-shirts. One of them yelled at us in Italian and pointed to the open gate.
We knew what he meant. Charlie and me were out of there. The boy followed us.
"GO!" one of them shouted at us.
"Them no good," another said. "Stay away."
We all ran back the same way. I couldn't hear the black-shirt guys behind us. When we reached the arena, we said to our rescuers, "Grazie."
I wanted to say so much more, like, We owe you big time! And I wanted to find out about Franco's black book. Maybe his black book was famous in Sicily. It might be like a history of the Sicilian mafia over his lifetime. But I couldn't because we didn't speak the same language. That sucked.
"Ciao," they replied. They stood and waved while we ran off.
Breathless, we found Mom and Dad, who were looking out over the sea. We had to get away in case the black-shirts came after us again.
I held my stomach and screwed up my face. "I need to lie down," I panted. "I think breakfast gave me food poisoning. Can we go back to the hotel?"