“That’s not—”
“You want a girl?” Palasota interrupted. “Just pick one. Or two. On the house.”
“That’s not what I came for,” Canidy said.
Jimmy Skinny laughed loudly.
“But that’s what everyone comes for! And to be with one of these beautiful pinup girls for an hour, they happily pay fifteen lire.”
Canidy did the conversion. That’s fifty cents.
Palasota smirked and added, “When the Americans get here, the price is going up to sixty lire.”
Canidy ignored that and instead said, “Maria is a beautiful woman. What I was going to ask is, who the hell hit her?”
Palasota looked at him a long moment, then nodded and said, “There’s an SS officer, head of the Palermo office here—”
“Müller,” Canidy interrupted, immediately understanding.
Palasota’s face gave away that he was impressed.
“Yeah,” he said, his tone now bitter and mocking, “Herr Sturmbannführer Hans Müller. He really is a mean bastard. And the one who was scared shitless about the May eighteenth bombings.”
Vito, at the mention of Müller, grunted contemptuously.
Canidy glanced at him, then back at Palasota as he thought: That’s saying something coming from one who’s known a mean bastard or two in his life.
“I’d suggest that that’s the understatement of the day,” Canidy said. “I’ve seen his work. He’s the sonofabitch who had the fishermen tortured after the cargo ship blew up in the harbor, then hung their bodies by wire nooses from the yardarm to rot. And he executed a professor from the university—at point-blank in front of Professor Rossi.”
And I think Mariano is some more of his handiwork—or at least his men’s.
Palasota looked at Canidy a long moment, then said, “I remember the bodies. Müller was ten kinds of pissed off. At the blowing up of the ship and the villa. He decided to send a message with that.”
“So I heard.”
“With such a hot temper, I do not think you will be surprised that he likes to smack around the girls. Especially when he’s been drinking; he’s one mean drunk, too. So, I pay the girls extra. Because of the abuse. And because they become damaged goods and can’t work. They are lucky if it’s just a bruise or two. That is what just happened with Maria. One girl was not so lucky after he ordered those fishermen hung.”
He paused to let Canidy consider that.
I hear you.
You’re saying I’m responsible for that collateral damage.
But you do understand the big picture. Otherwise we would not be having this talk. . . .
“Müller got pretty rough with her,” Palasota finished, “and she wound up cracking her skull on a table corner. He called it just an accident. But she’ll never be right in the head again. She just turned twenty.”
Canidy had a sudden mental image of the birthday dinner at Claridge’s that he’d had only months earlier with Ann Chambers—when they celebrated her twentieth.
Jesus H. Christ!
Rationally, I shouldn’t feel bad for a hooker. What happened to her is what’s called an occupational hazard.
But I do.
Especially after having almost lost Ann.
“And there’s no telling the sonofabitch no?”