one night as he lay drifting in and out of sleep he thought he heard a series of blood curdling sounds piercing animal screams an unsettling clamor of sinister bird cries as if something were being flayed alive the next morning he woke up with the feeling that he had had a terrifying nightmare and then when he left the house early that morning to catch the schoolbus he realized he was running a little late so he took a slightly different route instead of going to catch the bus at the usual stop he decided to go to the next stop over and so he cut through a narrow little street that intersects the street he lives on it’s called Via Giovanni Pascoli one of the houses along the street has a main outer door made of wood the big outer door of a house that’s been there for two hundred years one of those typical old houses owned by farmers and he suddenly sees and realizes as he looks just what the horrible screams were that he half heard as he lay drifting in and out of sleep he sees right before him on the massive wooden door two large birds have been crucified they were nailed alive to the wooden door with sharpened tree branches piercing their wings to brace them open and driven through the flesh of their legs someone had impaled on the door a live owl and a live dove and had left them there to scream through the night
the boy stands there in shock at the sight of this horrible spectacle and immediately afterward when he boards the schoolbus everybody is in a fever one of the kids is waving a copy of the local newspaper there’s a blaring front page headline that says that Antonio Bardellino’s body was found on a beach in Brazil he was beaten to death with a hammer everyone is amazed and all the kids are saying that it can’t be true and that evening when he gets back home everyone is upset everyone is talking about it the news hit them like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky everyone was dazed and anxious at the death of the revered and feared chief the death of a man who had become a legend a man that the town was proud of when all was said and done proud of and grateful to and in every house in town everyone was talking about this and everyone knew how and why it happened and who was behind it there were differing versions which triggered excited shouted debates everyone had their own views to put in an opinion or a comment
but then the boy thought to ask his father what was the meaning of the strange sight he had seen that morning on the massive outer door of the old peasant house and his father explained to him that this was an old country tradition that had been a common custom until before the war and involved crucifying on the front door of a house a pair of birds an owl and a dove letting them die slowly screaming all night long a sort of pagan ritual that was designed to exorcise the devil from the house and the person who had crucified the birds was the farmer who lived in that house a farmer about the same age as the boy’s father but with a much more old fashioned view of life and the world the farmer had done it to ward off the devil to protect himself against a tragic event and that was why the night before there had been this horrible pandemonium this welter of discordant screams and cries all night long and by the way what an unsettling coincidence the very next morning on the front page this unbelievable news
with the death of Antonio Bardellino the unquestioned boss of the organization everything fell apart it was the end of the balance of power that had been established in the organization among the various clans that had allowed it to expand so rapidly over the course of a few years to create a vast and articulated economic empire with a worldwide presence that not even the Sicilians had ever been able to establish an empire that extended from South America to eastern Europe fed by drug trafficking arms trafficking and corrupt public works contracts with the profits invested in our town and surrounding areas in construction in hotels in farms and agriculture cheese making cement plants industrial earth moving companies factories of every sort not to mention the more traditional underworld activities like shakedown and protection prostitution and gambling the organization took a ten percent cut on these activities
the balance of power had begun to break down because of a disagreement that at first seemed trifling a disagreement between one of Antonio Bardellino’s nephews called Antonio Salzillo who was something of a lieutenant a viceroy in Italy for his uncle who at this point was spending almost all his time in Santo Domingo a quarrel with Mario Iovine’s brother Mimmo over the payment of bribes that Mimmo had demanded from certain people who were in the territory of the Bardellinos and who were moreover people who could lay claim to Salzillo’s friendship Salzillo therefore considered this an act of hostility and an act that put him in a bad light therefore not something he could easily overlook and Salzillo after sending a series of warnings to Mimmo Iovine warnings that were ignored warnings to stop meddling in his territory decided to have him killed and it was this murder that unleashed a whole succession of other murders that ultimately led to the destruction of the organization and the death of its historic leaders
Mimmo Iovine was killed in an ambush in the street like ninety percent of the murders of this kind because going to the house where the target lives is considered too complicated first of all because it’s no simple matter and I’m not even saying to get into the house but to get near the house of a boss the houses of bosses nowadays have been turned into authentic bulletproof fortresses guarded on the outside by closed circuit TV cameras and armed patrols but also because going to the house means the risk of involving the family the wife and the children and therefore doing something that would cause outrage among the townspeople and so Mimmo Iovine who always traveled with an entourage of clan members and people who protected him was mowed down on the provincial road just outside Villa Literno as he was heading to his furniture factory in Castel-volturno he was killed in an ambush along with all his men
Mario Iovine was unwilling to accept passively the murder of his brother even if that brother had performed the most reviled and despicable acts on earth not merely because of the family tie which around here is especially strong even in such a disgraced family but especially because he considered it a personal insult that demanded to be cleansed with blood he called Antonio Bardellino in Santo Domingo and asked him to teach his nephew a lesson but Bardellino claimed that it was Mimmo who was in the wrong and that what had happened was bound to happen Mario Iovine however was not the kind of person who is willing to listen to reason and in any case he could not accept his brother’s murder and so encouraged by Sandokan as well he decided that Antonio Bardellino had to die by now relations were poisoned and murder was only the next logical step because in fact for a while now Mario Iovine had been nurturing the desire for revenge against the man who had long been considered the smartest member of the group the charismatic leader and now the explosive charge of resentment and envy that had been building up inside him could finally be detonated it was as if you could smell it in the air that after everything that had happened there was only room for one of the two and now the time had come for one of them to die
there are many who believe that Mimmo’s murder was an ambush laid by Sandokan to give Mario Iovine a justification for eliminating Antonio Bardellino and that it was Sandokan who persuaded Antonio Bardellino to authorize the elimination of Mimmo by telling him that Mimmo’s brother was in favor of that solution because Mimmo was a carabinieri informer and had helped the prosecution prevail in a trial but once Mimmo had been murdered Sandokan convinced Mario Iovine that Mimmo hadn’t deserved to be killed and so they plotted to murder Antonio Bardellino they traveled together to Brazil though there are those who claim that they killed Antonio Bardellino in Santo Domingo and then moved his body to Brazil where it was found there are numerous doubts on this point and in fact when his corpse was found some said that it wasn’t him at all but the corpse of a black man who more or less resembled him and that the whole thing was a cunning trick on Antonio Bardellino’s part to persuade everyone that he was dead so that he could carry on with his business affairs undisturbed
as always however telecapèra provided eyewitness accounts and confirmed that the corpse really was Antonio Bardellino’s dead body and told the story of how the group of select killers led by Mario Iovine and Sandokan went to Brazil where they killed him and left his corpse on the beach they killed him by strangling him with their bare hands and then they mutilated his face which is why doubts arose and some ventured the theory that the corpse wasn’t his another version is that on Sandokan’s advice Mario Iovine conveyed to to Antonio Bardellino the false report that Interpol had tracked him down in Santo Domingo and was about to arrest him and that he did this to induce Antonio Bardellino to travel to Brazil and when he arrived there at his beach house which was the clan base house there Mario Iovine and Sandokan were waiting for him in ambush but Mario Iovine’s pistol jammed so Sandokan stepped in and hit him at the base of the neck with a sledgehammer then hit him again repeatedly shattering his skull and then they wrapped the body in a carpet and buried it in a hole they dug on the beach
the very next thing that Mario Iovine did was make a phone call to the office of the lawyer Aldo Scalzone where Enzo De Falco was waiting and passed the word to massacre all the Bardellinos and their clans made men naturally the murder of Antonio Bardellino threw all his family members and relatives into a state of panic especially his nephew Antonio Salzillo who found himself next in line to take his uncle’s place as chief of the Bardellino clan since neither Ernesto nor the other brothers who were notorious bumblers and weaklings had the courage to do so and in fact as expected immediately after Antonio Bardellino’s murder the rival clans sent their men out to hunt down Antonio Salzillo who managed to elude his pursuers and go into hiding but they did capture his brother Paride and they took him to a house where the victors awaited him he was forced to sit in a chair and Sandokan strangled him with his hands while the others held down his arms and legs then his corpse was dissolved in acid
Antonio Salzillo realized that the territory was too hot for him to stay and decided to leave town as quickly as possible and to leave Italy as well but since his passport had been confiscated he needed a false identity document and to get one he turned to the person who had procured a fake ID for his uncle Antonio Bardellino but then Antonio Bardellino had been arrested in Spain probably ratted out by a rival clan carrying a counterfeit identity document but he managed to bribe the magistrates he was set free on bail pending trial but the identity card was made out to the son of the deputy mayor of Casale di Principe who had clan ties and so it was possible to track down the person who had made the counterfeit ID it was the father of a kid I went to school with the father was named Gaetano Piscitelli at the time he was a clerk in the Casale town hall this man had an insane passion for gambling whether it was cards or horse racing or dog racing whatever the bet and that meant he worked mornings at the town hall and spent his afternoons and evenings frequenting the various gambling dens and in my town and neighboring towns there are dozens and dozens
at practically every café bar or pool hall after a certain hour in the evening they pull down the metal security blind and set up a secret gambling den and in fact there’s a special signal for anyone who gets there late so if you knock on the security blind because you saw the lights on behind it and you don’t give the recognition code if you don’t know the signal because you’re not a trusted member of the circle they’ll never open up and let you in Gaetano Piscitelli was a member of every gambling circle there was he spent his afternoons and his evenings and his nights gambling he went to Naples to bet on horses and to the cinodromo or dog track in Naples he’d go to play cards for stakes wherever there was a game and all this of course meant he had an incessant and voracious need for money and he did everything he could think of to get it one time a printer who was a friend of my father’s had to do a job for the town government of Casale di Principe where Gaetano Piscitelli worked and Piscitelli secretly told him to pad the invoice to the town government a little and they’d split the difference between them clearly his constant thirst for cash made him willing to do anything even commit crimes
so they managed to track him down as the source of that fake ID card he was arrested and convicted and served a three month sentence along with the guy who had provided him with the details to put on the identity document along with the photograph of Antonio Bardellino this experience of course helped to sober him up plus a short while later after one of his all night bouts of gambling and playing cards while he was on his way home he fell asleep at the wheel and drove off the road right into a luminaria those poles by the side of the road where they hang the luminarie during the town festivals or at Christmas the signs saying happy holidays the pole crashed down onto the car and Piscitelli was trapped there all night long unconscious in the car and he spent five or six months in the hospital in a complete body cast arms broken ribs shattered the accident seemed to bring him to his senses he tried to give up cards or at least he didn’t gamble with the same degree of recklessness and so when Antonio Bardellino’s nephew came to ask him if he would do the same favor for him that he had done for his uncle the only answer he could give him was no
because he said to him look I’ve spent three months in prison for you all right you gave me money in exchange but now I’m really not up to repeating the experience I’m a normal person I have an honest job I have a family I want to just mind my own fucking business and be left alone but his refusal was a big problem for Antonio Salzillo who needed this counterfeit document so he could escape so he could save his life and avoid Mario Iovine’s vendetta and he perceived this refusal as an offense that he could not forgive he was a hothead this was not the sort of thing he could forget about and a few days later Gaetano Piscitelli was taken as he left work at the town hall he was put into a car and that was the last anyone knew about him he vanished and some time later I was hanging out with his son and Gianni the son of the lawyer with clan ties asked him where his father was the son answered that his father had left home because of the constant fighting with his mother over his damned gambling addiction but then after the son of Gaetano Piscitelli left Gianni turned to me and said that he had been murdered and sealed into a concrete pylon on a highway overpass and he said it with a cool matter of fact tone that took my breath away