"Laura Resnick - Under a Sky More Fiercely Blue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

few feet away, but I kept pulling the trigger until the chamber was empty.
Then I dropped the gun and was instantly, violently sick.
It's a miracle that I escaped the house alive, but I was a small,
pathetic-looking boy, and I doubt if Vizzini's men realized that I, and not an
intruder, had killed both men until long after I had slipped out of the window
and melted into the darkness.
I disappeared into the hills, stole a sheep two days later, and
returned home to my mother, who clutched me so fiercely I could scarcely
breathe, then beat me for being gone so long with no explanation.
The Allies invaded in July of that year, and there was such confusion
and chaos that the battle for Sicily took over three months. Palermo and
Messina, as well as many villages, were devastated by Allied bombing, and we
were left to clean up the mess by ourselves; since the invasion of Sicily had
taken twice as long as expected, the Allies were practically running after the
retreating Nazis in order to make up for lost time and to adhere to the plan
for the Allied offensive on the Italian mainland.
Tommaso did survive the war, and he eventually came home. He had been a
prisoner of war in Kenya since 1939. Although the experience had taught him to
hate the British bitterly, he had fallen in love with Africa. He stayed in
Sicily only long enough to marry his childhood sweetheart, then he took her
back to Kenya where he started farming.
After my grandfather died, I took my mother to live in Palermo, leaving
behind Serradifalco and its bitter memories -- as well as Signor Cataldo and
his enduring stories about the great Lucky Luciano and the gold-paved streets
of America. I returned to school and eventually became the first man in my
family to ever attend university. After receiving my diploma, I worked for the
government as a civil engineer, developing modern methods of distributing
water throughout Sicily, so that no ordinary man would ever again have to
carry water home from a public fountain because the water supply was
controlled by certain "friends."
I was still a young man when the Americans, for reasons known only to
themselves, decided to seek out and prosecute Charles Luciano. They didn't
have much luck, despite their repeated requests to the government in Rome to
assist in Luciano's extradition from Sicily, where he had "escaped to" during
the war.
Naturally, no one ever bothered to tell the officials from Washington
or Rome that Luciano had been dead since 1943. They were, after all,
outsiders.
-- The End --
****
In July of 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, and the Fascist government toppled
five weeks later. Despite two decades of decline under Fascism, the Sicilian
Mafia quickly stepped into the power breach -- with notable help from the
Americans.
Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who was serving a thirty year prison sentence




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