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Artie Renna, assassin, whizzed open the cigarette-tarred drapes in camera 203, pushed through louvered doors and onto a veranda overlooking a still cove—the first of Sicily he'd seen in sunlight.
     The sea lay in the fresh morning as a gleaming marble slab: milky teal beside the crescent beach, splotches of turquoise, deep blues going to purple along the horizon—smooth, cool...as his stiletto had been, sinking to its hilt in the base of Ninu Monte's skull last night...but, like sweet crimson wine, the color then.
     The execution still looped in his brain: Ninu sagging in his chair, the final breath, the retiring sigh.
     A jasmine gust whisked Artie's face, fluttered his T-shirt, the hair on his arms. He yearned to share this peace with his Beth—though not the Ninu part—and looked back to the bed in which he'd so missed her last night. He created her in reverie, watched. In her sleep, she had the vacant, delicate face of a porcelain doll; she lifted the face from its side, blossomed awake, his Beth. He loved the sight of her, more than when he'd first been struck by her twenty years earlier. Her hopeful shine and child's dimples emerged as she rolled onto her back, stiffening, stretching mightily.
     "What's it like, Babe?" she yawned, softly whisking her sheet aside. She streamed onto the veranda.
     He regarded her, gratified her smile was deep and unaffected.
     "Real!" he answered aloud. He dragged in breath, eyes shining, lip-corners dipping, her fingers combing his silvery hair, tracing his proud jaw.
     The sound of his own voice wakened him to the actuality of the fragrant breeze he was breathing—in the very place his parents' breaths had long been measured or stifled—here, in his new world. He smiled thinly in the irony.
     And Ninu Monte could hardly spoil anything. Yet, as satisfying and vindicating last night had been, he still bristled calling to mind that Ninu had been able to weasel away the land of Artie's own father—land Pietru Renna had intended to return to after some of the easier life in America, land upon which Artie had every right to build a villa.
     Ninu, lu pazzu, The Madman—as a youth, having discouraged some dangerous characters by biting off and swallowing their leader's lips, chasing him down, bashing him to death with a boulder—had proved to be routine. Artie had known the careless maniac insisted on spending his hour alone each night, sipping anisetta on a bench in the drowsing piazza near la chiesa granni, the great church.
     Artie's bowels had churned as his flight touched down at Palermo's Punta Raisi; studying his watch, he knew he would be slipping in his blade in no more than two hours.

     Artie startled himself, realizing that it was no longer Beth's touch he was imagining in the warm, bright sunshine; instead, these fingers were bony, coarse—Ninu's?
     But...her soft voice; it was Beth.
     "Get ready," she was saying—her smile, though, now synthetic. "Your cousin could be early."
     The void behind her smile unsettled him; his passion dissolved. He couldn't bear thinking perhaps their years together had decayed her cheer and optimism.
     She placed an ear on his heartbeat and squeezed into him for a moment. Soon he remembered she wasn't there.

     Artie stared down at the beach thinking of Beth and the sensation of cold, stiff fingers on his face when he became aware of an old fisherman stirring on the sand. The man was wailing a peasant worksong, inspecting a fishnet, falling silent often to concentrate on damage he would repair.
     Curious, Artie called down in dialect, asked how it was going.
     "As God would have it," the man shrugged. "You're an American."
     "I'll work on my accent."
     The fisherman lifted his cap and raked back snowy locks. The dazzling white topped a baked face which seemed as tanned as possible and Artie could see his eyes were as blue as the sea.
     "Sicilians don't stay at the hotel...unless they were born in America. Besides," the man smirked omnisciently, "your wife is an American for sure."
     Artie recoiled, sensing this was somehow more than just a clever guess. He'd never been more careful, yet this old man already knew something of him, impossibly—as if, in peasant song, he'd really been examining Artie's thoughts, not fishnets.
     "Are you fisherman or clairvoyant?" Artie laughed, thinking he may have to kill this man soon.
     "I only know how to fish."
     "Seems a simple, good life. Who are you?"
     "I'm Masi Giannola, assuring you hunger is never fine. You've family here?"
     "Maybe a cousin in the village still."
     "Ah, si?" Masi slouched against an overturned rowboat, his cool narrowed eyes fused to Artie. "I believe you've stolen your father's face. Are you Arturo?"
     The easy, reflexive connection to his roots, to Beth, raced his heart, but he pleasantly answered, "Si." The sooner he confirmed his fears, the better.
     "Then your cousin is Paula who owns the panetteria in the piazza—a woman who could bake for royalty."
     "If you say so," Artie smiled. But he abruptly erased the smile, then: "Masi Giannola, why did you come here?"
     Masi boomed his response like an explosion, his words rumbling forth as from a raging oracle. "Arturo Renna, there are shadows beneath this bright sun!, shadows that mourn Ninu Monte!"
     "Silenzio!" Artie ordered, incredulous. "You're mad!"
     Masi beamed hugely then faced the sea, shoulders sagging forward, head drooping. His hair was no longer thick cotton but sparse and oily gray like Ninu's...and he wore a stiletto in his brain stem.
     Artie pressed his fingertips against his eyes and when he looked again the fisherman was gone.

     Artie, awaiting Paula, sipped a cappuccino in the hotel's lobby. A white Fiat Punto carrying a female pilot zipped into the lot and lunged into a first row space; red-brown dirt covered the bottom half of its battered body. He went out, oddly pleased by the unpretentiousness of the car.
     A composed lady adjusted the skirt of her simple gray suit, pushed long silky hair aside, and slipped a purse onto her shoulder.
     She came up the cobbled walkway cradling a package, her face wearing the grave tenderness of a Raphael Madonna. Setting her gift down on a marble bench, she held out her arms to Artie and they embraced. "Sangu mieu," she said. "My own blood."
     He moved back her silver-stranded chestnut hair to see her fully, looked into large eyes, amber eyes like his own; her thin face was scrubbed and cool, feminine.
     Paula rustled open the package and carefully handed over a bouquet of almond paste sunflowers nestled in a cone of bright red and yellow tissue. The colors and details of the sunflowers were astonishingly accurate and he thought them real until their aroma rolled forth.
     "These are the colors and sunshine of Sicily," she said proudly. "We made them of pasta reale in the traditional way. They're almond paste and sugar — sweet and good."
     "They're exquisite!" said Artie with huge eyes. "How could I ever eat them?"
     "Ah, but they were made to be eaten," she explained.

     Artie and Paula stood in the hotel's parking lot next to the Fiat she called her babbaluciu, her little snail.
     "That's la turri," Paula said pointing to a boxy ruin on the tip of a finger of land forming the right shore of the cove, "and your father's property meets the beach, just to the right of the peninsula."
     His flesh tingled with enchantment at the site's ethereal beauty. He imagined the villa he would build on the very soil he had slain Ninu Monte to retrieve...and evening walks on the beach with Beth.
     He would handle the Masi Giannola problem whichever way he must, then that would be enough of that sort of thing. He would make Beth happy here.
     La turri's proximity to this property was apt. He'd often heard his parents and their paisani mention the ruin—a tenth-century watchtower built by a colony of Arabs to scan for and defend against marauders from the sea, rebuilt by conquering Normans in the eleventh century.
     It put in mind the fort he and a pal had built in a stand of maples when he was thirteen—to guard the last woods in his neighborhood south of Detroit. He had named their domain The Most Beautiful Place in Wayne County and had spent many hours alone there straddling a hollow tree trunk that bridged the creek; he would watch occasional carp slip by, glad no one had planted them there, disappointed they would eventually share water with freighters and tankers in the Detroit River.
     He'd hoped for a chance to hurl rocks at the heads of sniffing real estate developers.

     A hundred meters from the hotel Paula veered right and forced the growling Fiat uphill, talking of her life with Turi, her husband.
     Artie barely listened, now appreciating what had been hidden in darkness — when Ninu had been all that mattered.
     They rose up through the Sicilian spring, through Persephone's gifts: groves of saracen olives, fragrant oranges and almonds, chestnuts, pomegranates.
     He didn't mind much that the orchards were unpruned, untended...that sumac, wood sorrel, and wild mustard were winning back the soil.
     And he didn't mind, as they wound up to the village, the occasional bright-white villa slipping by—each garlanded with hanging laundry. He could indeed live among these people—not like in America...where his secret mattered so.
     Although his work had never been strictly business, they would soon accept him, respect him—despite his dark appetite. Besides, he'd sated himself only with murderers and he would never again act on his impulses. Yes, he and Beth would walk among these real people, even drink and eat and laugh with those who also had evolved from nearly three millennia of sufferers, from survivors who had passively soaked up wave after wave of invaders. They would admire this American: one of their own who had power, who would hang his laundry amongst them.

     The beige village clung to a mighty calcareous cliff like a worried child to its mother's legs. The bustle astonished Artie: beeping Fiats; vendors shouting, buzzing the narrow streets in little three-wheeler api; Natalie Merchant blaring from a push cart loaded with CD's.
     Paula circled the piazza's fountain then parked between the worn marble steps of the great church and an espresso bar. Two loud men at a sidewalk table suddenly stilled their dramatic hands and lowered their faces to sip espresso; a few doors down, a black-clad old woman parted a bead curtain for a look.
     "We're here," Paula said, squirming out of the babbaluciu. "Come. Meet Turi."
     Artie thought Beth, were she there, would surely have pitched a coin into the water as they passed the fountain. In fact, for a crazy blink, Artie mistook a woman at the fountain for her, but the woman wasn't blonde, and Beth was in Michigan. No, this woman was a mother, busy splashing her small boy's chocolate-smeared face and fingers in a cool stream spewing from the mouth of a stone cherub. The mother glanced up, smiled at Artie's stare; the child didn't look, but went rigid under his mother's arm...and frowned into the water.

     Paula's panetteria occupied the bottom flat of a narrow, three-story casa within the ancient strip of residences and shops surrounding the piazza. Luscious smells of breads and pastries wafted out from the bakery's open door; the window displayed samples of the morning's production and of pasta reale—real-looking prickly pears, oranges, figs, peaches.
     In the hot back room, Turi gushed, "A great pleasure!" wiping his palms on his aproned belly, then drawing Artie in with floured arms, kissing both sides of his face.
     Turi's droopy eyes, his perfect milk-white teeth between fat, happy cheeks, were charming, innocuous...until he pulled open the door to a storage closet...until Masi Giannola appeared, pointing a lupara's sawed-off barrel at Artie's face.
     Artie searched Paula's marsala eyes; she was motioning in the two men he'd seen sipping espresso in the piazza. Her eyes were unapologetic; they might have been watching her own hands forming pasta reale.
     "Don't worry, my cousin," she said dryly. "They need to reach an agreement with you...about the land. We'll go down to the property now for a talk."
     Artie had no chance to unholster the Beretta 8040 under his untucked shirt; Turi quickly, mechanically, found it in the small of Artie's back. He would have to wait for a chance; rage boiled his insides. This!—just when he'd begun to feel his and Beth's new life blossoming like the fragrant hillsides.
     But as much as anything, Artie was troubled by Masi's sun-charred face, the capless head upon which thick tufts curled upward like white flames. And the eyes. The eyes were deathly cool.

     Artie was taken—wrists manacled behind his back—down to the sea in the front seat of the espresso-sippers' dirty black Mercedes. Masi Giannola sat in back, silent, propping the lupara's barrel against Artie's nape; Paula and Turi tailed in the babbaluciu.
     At the base of the peninsula, Artie noticed, gladly, that Masi had somehow disappeared. But the others jerked his relief away, hauling him from the car and steadily pushing him toward la turri.
     "Aren't you my blood?" Artie demanded, craning back to Paula.
     "But Ninu Monte needs to see you, my cousin," Paula implored. "He complains your last meeting was brief."
     "And you want to send me to hell for another visit? You treacherous bitch!"
     She forced a nervous chuckle; Turi's white teeth glinted inside an unrestrained grin.

     Within the tower's sandstone blocks, Masi Giannola squatted patiently on the first step of a crumbling stone stairway that spiraled upward along the inside walls.
     Artie so longed to see Beth again. And he was afraid to die, terror humming in his ears, but he could never gulp down his pride. His voice thundered at Masi: "Do it!"
     But Masi sighed, slumped; his lupara slipped away, clattered on the stone floor. Artie's legs dropped away as he watched the thing reassume the body of Ninu Monte. This was not a dream to be evaporated by a distraction, or a simple pressing of the fingertips against the eyes. Artie was quite awake, his mind unable to seize upon any hope.
     Turi flew past Artie to help Ninu, went to him with trembling hands and wet eyes, kissed the sides of Ninu's face. He pried up gently on the planted stiletto, lifting the yellow-gray face. Through stiff cracked lips that didn't move, Ninu croaked with wagging tongue: "Now I'll taste your beating heart, Arturo Renna."
     The two men from the piazza yanked Artie to his feet and savagely rent away his shirt, shoved him forward.
     Turi waggled the knife's pommel with his fingertips, loosening, finally extricating the blade. Ninu took the knife from him, swiping black blood onto his sleeve.
     "I'm one of you," Artie heard himself say, embarrassed by the odor of his urine.
     "Oh, but you're not," Ninu replied, holding the knife absurdly close to his rheumy eyes, examining. "You're an American."
     Artie looked away as the two men outstretched his arms. But then, as his body tensed to receive the steel, what he saw lay against his breast as armor, rendering the dagger silly. He brightened, becoming, gradually, fully as bright and cool as the sky cupping this morning's serene sea. He soared — for Paula was streaming toward him, just as Beth might have, and she was regarding him with the grave tenderness of a Raphael Madonna.
     Cradling one of the gift sunflowers, she went to him.
     "Sangu mieu," she whispered, reverently snapping off a piece from the tiny yellow petals. She slipped the pasta reale past Artie's lips as though it were a sacred host. She held him closely as he, with closed eyes, chewed the sweet almond paste. Then, Ninu cocking his arm for the plunge, she stepped away.

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