Honoured Society by Norman Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

male. When a promising young official from the Magistrates’ Court of Villalba began to pay her attentions, Calogero Vizzini got together a juvenile gang, burst into the Solazzo home one evening, dragged the interloper outside, and beat him nearly to death. After this demonstration the Solazzo heiress was left in peace by all potential suitors, and remained a spinster until the end of her days. Calogero was arrested and placed on trial for criminal assault, but through the powerful intercession of his uncle, the bishop, the Solazzo family agreed to the whole thing’s being hushed up and the case was quashed.
    The following year Calogero Vizzini’s career began in earnest, with his choice for a livelihood of the exciting and dangerous profession of the cancia – which in turn led to his association with a remarkable man. Practicians of the cancia acted, in effect, as intermediaries between peasants who wanted their wheat milled into flour, and the mills, located for the most part in inaccessible places along the coast – in the case of Villalba, fifty miles away. The mills were controlled by an ancient, highly specialised and extremely ferocious branch of the Mafia, which refused to tolerate the building of any competitive mills outside its own area. To take charge of the grain and get it safely to its destination across roads unceasingly infested by bandits, called for more than usual toughnessand resource. Calogero Vizzini tackled this problem by coming to an arrangement with the leading bandit of the day, Paolo Varsalona, whose hide-out was, as usual, in the nearby Cammarata mountains.
    Varsalona, who was Calogero’s mentor in his most impressionable years, was too intelligent a man to have become a bandit other than through circumstances that left him no option. In this case it was a scrupulous regard for the sacred law of vendetta, the fulfilment of which was regarded by most Sicilians of his day as almost an act of piety. Varsalona’s brother had been murdered, and at the trial a witness was produced who did his best to provide the men accused of the crime with an alibi. Varsalona felt obliged to blow his head off with a blunderbuss. Once an outlaw, and however reluctant Varsalona may have been to take to the maquis , he brought to the problems of banditry the clear vision and the fresh approach of the talented outsider. Up till this time classical Sicilian brigands had organised themselves in mounted bands. They cultivated a fierce appearance, wore outlandish clothing, carried obsolete but impressive blunderbusses, and, in short, placed great reliance on terror. It was the habit, for example, of one of Varsalona’s predecessors to ride at the head of his men, carrying by way of a personal standard a skull stuck on a pole. The psychological merits of these old-fashioned tactics were offset by considerable drawbacks. By their very size and the amount of disturbance they created such bands were relatively easy to locate, and were sooner or later destroyed in pitched battles with the police.
    The novel strategy invented by Varsalona – for which the bandit Giuliano was later to receive the credit – was simply to arrange for his men to be mobilised and demobilised at will. The Varsalona band went quietly to a planned operation on foot and in their workaday clothes, and when it was over they slipped just as quietly back to their everyday occupations, if they possessed any. With these will-o’-the-wisp tactics Varsalona was outstandingly successful over a number of years, and newspapers got into the habit of calling him ‘the bandit phenomenon’. Calogero’s admiration for him was such that, while carrying on with the bread-and-butter business of the cancia , he decided also to enrol in the Varsalona band. In 1902, after several valuable years of experience gainedin this way, Calogero Vizzini found himself standing trial with the rest of the band – which had finally fallen into a trap set by the police – for