Excerpt
MICHAEL CORLEONE STOOD on a long wooden dock in Palermo and watched the great
ocean liner set sail for America. He was to have sailed on that ship, but new
instructions had come from his father.
He waved goodbye to the men on the little fishing boat who had brought him to
this dock, men who had guarded him these past years. The fishing boat rode the
white wake of the ocean liner, a brave little duckling after its mother. The men
on it waved back; he would see them no more.
The dock itself was alive with scurrying laborers in caps and baggy clothes
unloading other ships, loading trucks that had come to the long dock. They were
small wiry men who looked more Arabic than Italian, wearing billed caps that
obscured their faces. Amongst them would be new bodyguards making sure he came
to no harm before he met with Don Croce Malo, Capo di Capi of the " Friends
of the Friends, " as they were called here in Sicily. Newspapers and the
outside world called them the Mafia, but in Sicily the word Mafia never passed
the lips of the ordinary citizen. As they would never call Don Croce Malo the
Capo di Capi but only " The Good Soul."
In his two years of exile in Sicily, Michael had heard many tales about D ... read full excerpt from The Sicilian ebook
