Page 92 of Marcello

The money was nice…

But most everything else got worse.

Much worse.

For all two years, I was Cesare’s right-hand man…

And the soul-destroying horror of all the things I saw gradually numbed me to anything but the worst atrocities.

I could tell you a thousand loathsome stories about Cesare Caproni.

Like the night he ordered me to come to his ‘bachelor pad’ in the city and had me dispose of the body of the woman he’d raped and accidentally killed while he was high.

Or the time he murdered a thirteen-year-old drug dealer who worked for him because the kid was skimming an extra 50 euros off his weekly drug sales.

Or the time I walked in on Cesare fucking his sister.

He reached for his gun in a fit of rage and fired at me, missing me by inches; Lucrezia just laughed.

I bolted and didn’t come around again for two days, just in case. The next time I saw him, Cesare seemed to have forgotten all about it.

That last example wasn’t nearly as evil as the previous two, but it was still pretty fucked up.

In all that time, though, I never saw anything I thought Fausto would accept in exchange for my freedom…

Until the prison riot.

A year and a half after I started working for Cesare, the old guy who ran the clan had a heart attack and died. Aristide Caproni became the new leader, which essentially made Cesare second-in-command.

Six months later, Aristide was arrested. He was having dinner at the same restaurant he ate at every Friday night, with one of the dozen or so mistresses he kept on the side.

(Cesare’s mother had walked out years before. From the gossip I heard, she videotaped everything she knew and gave her lawyers instructions that if she was murdered or died ‘mysteriously,’ they were to share the video with the police and the media, and post it all across the internet. Last I heard, she got 30 million euros in the divorce and was living her best life on the French Riviera.)

Anyway, Aristide was eating dinner with a woman 25 years his junior when the Neapolitan police burst in and arrested him on charges of racketeering.

When Cesare heard about it, he went berserk. He blamed ‘that Cosa Nostra fuck Amato’ for bribing the Naples police chief, and vowed he would burn down the entire city in retaliation.

But when Aristide got 13 years in prison, Cesare and Lucrezia took over the clan’s daily operations, and Cesare calmed the fuck down. At least about his father’s incarceration, anyway. He was still a raging psychopath.

Aristide called every day from the prison payphone and gave them coded instructions.

Lucrezia handled the day-to-day business and proved herself remarkably capable. I knew she was smart; I hadn’t realized she was brilliant.

Cesare, on the other hand, continued to do what he did best: terrorize people and murder them.

I continued my shellshocked existence, drowning my sorrows in alcohol and the occasional one-night stand, and bided my time until I found something I could use to gain my family’s freedom.

Then came the riot.

I was at the meat-packing plant when it happened.

Cesare was exercising in the same room where I’d shot the Cosa Nostra foot soldier two years before.

That horrifying memory had faded into background noise, the result of a thousand other horrifying incidents hacking away my sensitivities and cauterizing them at the stump.

By ‘exercising,’ I meant Cesare had strung a bookie up on a meat hook and was using him as a punching bag. The bookie was a member of a rival Camorra clan that had made the mistake of trying to take over some of the Capronis’ territory.

I preferred the stench of the meat-packing floor to watching a man get beaten to death, so I was alone when I got the Google alert. I’d set it up to ping me on anything about San Vittore, the prison in Milan where Aristide was serving his sentence.