Sicilian Tragedee Read Online Free Page A

grin.
     
     
    Turi Pirrotta’s liver is on fire— his liver, not the goose liver on offer at the buffet—if only he could handle that, he’d gladly eat Wanda’s
liver too, that goose he had married when he was a kid, and who thank God seemed to have found herself a boyfriend recently because she was busting his balls much less than usual.
    At home, that is.
    Because on official occasions, ball-buster that she is, she loves to show up with her dear husband at her side, revered, adored, respected, and admired.
    Only that just now the mayor of Siracusa had pretended not to see him and the president of the fucking province of Siracusa had chatted with him for a millisecond and then headed off with some excuse, and the commissioner for public works of Pozzallo had given him the smart-ass treatment, and Bad Luck Wanda had that look on her face that said she was about to start torturing him right here in public.
    Her eyes were burning with the acid question that her lips were posing: Isn’t there something you should be telling me?
    There’s absolutely fuck-all I should be telling you, Turi Pirrotta’s fixed smile continued to reply.
    But the fact is that word has been spreading, this is the kind of news you can’t keep secret. His business rival, Alfio Turrisi, privately known as Alfio Dickhead Turrisi, that moron who has people calling him “Mister” Turrisi, has been gobbling up all the real estate between Rosolini and Ispica, where it is pretty clear by now that drillers have struck oil.
    An American company had gotten the natural gas rights but the documents spoke of “liquid extraction rights” and down at the regional assembly environmentalists, engineers, and commissioners, all of whom were intent on their own interests, were squabbling over whether those “liquids” included petroleum.
    Meanwhile, however, it was to be expected that someone would grab the titles to those properties, and Turrisi, with his alluring liquidity, his favorable pound-euro exchange rate (for he was well introduced
among London banks), and his perfect dick of a face … well, everyone knows that the guy with the dick-face always manages to screw his neighbor.
    London!
    Hey, Turi Pirrotta himself could have gone into business in London if it hadn’t been for that disaster of a wife of his who in his younger days had kept him on a leash shorter than a pit bull’s. And if it hadn’t been for that double disaster of a daughter of his, Betty, who for all the paternal goodwill in the world had turned out to be a supreme ball-breaker, with a cherry so well chiseled that even the artisans who carved the putti in the houses designed by Vaccarini couldn’t compete.
    Under these conditions, the last thing you want to do is be seen on some public occasion. You want to be seen staying home and plotting—what’s it called?— strategy , vendettas, war, and all that shit. You don’t go to the big lunch where the mayor of Siracusa comes up to you, stares at you with that cocksucker face of his that says it all, pauses a moment to see if you have anything to tell him, you who have nothing to tell him because all the land is being sold to Turrisi, and then moves on, with an excuse, to somebody else.
    And then they complain when they get blown away.
    What is Pirrotta supposed to do? Go out and gun down the brokers, the real estate agents, threaten the property owners, blow things up? He’s too old for that kind of stuff. And meanwhile Turrisi is young and energetic.
    Turrisi is young, energetic, and, as we said, a dick-face.
    And he doesn’t have his nerves shredded by someone like Wanda who if you didn’t take her to the big lunch with stars of stage and screen would have raised such a firestorm at home that Pirrotta would have had to forget about slipping out to see Rosina, a girl so fine—young, pretty, sweet-smelling, and not even that much of a bitch—that Pirrotta can’t figure out why the Good Lord has given her to