Greenmantle Read Online Free Page B

Greenmantle
Book: Greenmantle Read Online Free
Author: Charles De Lint
Tags: Fiction
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thinking about the girl. He didn’t know what it was about her, but she was the first person he’d been able to relax around since all the shit went down a couple of years ago. She was a cute kid—skinny, sure, but he wasn’t in the market for kids anyway. He just liked her. There was something about her that drained away the constant tension he felt around other people. He went back over their conversation, smiling when he remembered her “Mr. a-Tony.” He hoped she’d come back, hoped her old lady wouldn’t think he was some kind of pervertito looking to put the squeeze on her little daughter.
    Yeah, he thought as he finished loading the cut grass into his wheelbarrow. He’d like to see her again. He was usually passably friendly with whomever he ran into in the area, but it was all putting on a show. He had to be careful—the fratellanza had their fingers in everything, everywhere. He should know. And if word ever got out that he was up here… But you couldn’t just hide out—being a recluse caused just as much talk as flash did. You had to balance it, play the game of fitting in, but never let your guard down.
    “Don’t go for flash,” Mario had taught him. “Nobody likes a big shot, you know what I’m saying? But don’t be humble either, or you get no respect. Be clean and polite and everybody’s going to like you, nobody’s going to talk about you too much. In our business, Tony, that’s the way of the world. Così fan tutti .”
    Which was okay when you had your family around, but it got lonely for a guy in his position. Sometimes you just wanted to sit down with someone and take it easy—not shoot off your mouth or nothing, but just relax. And if it had to be with a skinny little kid, well, that’d be the way it was in his world.
    He dumped the grass out by the barn, stowed the wheelbarrow and rake inside, then went into the house to take a shower. When he was done, he cleared the fog on the mirror and studied himself. He’d seen the kid’s eyes on his scars. He should probably be more careful, but what the hell. If he had to walk around the place in a three-piece, he might as well be in the slammer.
    The word on the street was that the feds had taken him in on their Witness Protection Program, that they were letting him cop a plea so long as he fingered a few of the bosses. Anyone who believed that didn’t know Tony Valenti. He had no fight with the fratellanza . All he wanted was the guy who’d set him up and when he got hold of that pezzo di merda …
    Valenti sighed and unclenched his fists. He was working to forget that and getting pretty good at it. What good was remembering? He couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. Yet when he tried to forget, he could feel himself changing, could feel the hardness inside going soft, and he didn’t want to hear nobody saying that Tony Valenti’d gone soft. Thinking about it, about what had been taken from him—that was all he had left. These days it all just confused him. Sure, the fratellanza was only providing services to people, giving them what they wanted, but the longer Valenti was outside the family influence, the more things didn’t seem so cut and dried.
    The brotherhood was a system of isistemazione , giving order to chaos. It had its roots in the compagnie d’armi of eleventh-century Western Sicily—small private armies set up by the landowners to defend their families and estates from marauding bandits that eventually became the cosche that still rule the area today. The original men of honor were a rough peasant version of the knights of chivalry; the present-day Sicilian cosca , or family unit, took its name from a corruption of the dialect term for artichoke: a composition of separate leaves forming a solid unit. The similarities between them and their ancestors were only surface ones now, while the gap between the modern cosche and their counterparts in North America was immense.
    It was a media fiction that the criminal

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