successive generations with otherworldly powers. I moved on, reading:
There was a rumor of an even more mysterious property to the phenomenon (ghiaccio furioso). Supposedly, there was one family in particular known for its blue eyes flecked with the same gold as their Egyptian ancestor. These people were capable, in times of extreme pain or passion, of emitting a charge or spark from that fearful gaze, with the gold serving as an emotional-electrical conductor. While the research team did not witness this attribute, it did note several volatile electrical storms happening in Buondiavolo. It was also noted that every home, without exception, bore a lightning-scarred weather vane.
I lowered the notebook, thinking of the weather vane atop our house on Balmoral Avenue.
The night Grandpa Enzo died, I came home to the news in a swirl of wind and rain. My dad, clearly traumatized, opened the door just as a bolt of lightning destroyed a tree. The rest of the evening, while the household mourned and an emotional storm churned within my father, lightning repeatedly struck the old weather vane. Now I wondered,
Was it the storm or my dad?
Also, the sentence that read “a rumor of an even more mysterious property to the phenomenon” confirmed that cold fury and electricity were interrelated. Those who bore gold flecks in their eyes conducted electricity “in times of extreme pain or passion,” meaning
after
cold fury had kicked in.
So now I knew how it appeared. I wondered, then, if its purpose was anything other than lethal.
Rereading the page, I found the thread of an answer in the first paragraph. “Alexander . . . absorbed the tribe into his army, making it an elite unit, the first to engage difficult enemies.”
I flipped to the chapter entitled
“Metodi”
(“Methods”), and traced the page with a finger until I found frighteningly similar words. A note scribbled in the margin read, “Daggers is the first line of defense against our difficult problems.” The chapter discussed notorious Outfit guys with names like Harry “The Hook,” Jimmy “The Bomber,” and Eddie “The Axe,” all of them small potatoes compared to Nicky “Daggers” Fratelli. The others’ nicknames were self-explanatory, and while it seemed as if Fratelli’s was too, it actually had nothing to do with his use of knives; it referenced the fearsome gaze he affixed to his victims, as in “shooting daggers.” The chapter explained how he would start an argument, escalate it to a confrontation, and, when he was nice and pissed off, immobilize the poor mope with his terrifying glare and then coolly murder him.
Funny,
I thought with horror,
Uncle Nicky seemed like such a sweet old man.
He’d been Grandpa Enzo’s second cousin, a frail, elderly, soft-spoken presence at holidays and birthday parties when I was little. Even now I can see his watery blue eyes dotted with fading flecks of gold as he patted my head and slipped me a twenty-dollar bill. He was an old man by that time, an Outfit veteran past his prime and, as I learned from the notebook, known far and wide for his infamous “Look,” which froze adversaries like rats in a headlight. Of course I realized he was using cold fury—the ancient ghiaccio furioso of our ancestors. The notebook explained how from 1959 through 1983, on Outfit orders, Uncle Nicky murdered four hundred and thirty-three people in eight states and four countries—a gag-inducing average of twenty-four corpses a year. It was enough to dry out my tongue, but the next passage made me feel as if I’d mainlined Novocain:
And although Daggers never revealed his precise method for pushing a button, it was clear Ben Franklin had nothing on him: every one of his “clients” met their maker through the tried and true procedure of electrocution. In fact, most of them were found with their eyes burnt out of their skulls and . . .
I lowered the notebook. The Outfit had used violent death for punishment or profit,
Daniela Fischerova, Neil Bermel