Joseph sat back and let the smoke settle before speaking again.
"When my father learned what I had done, he did not beat me. Not immediately. That would have suggested interest. What he did instead was worse. He withdrew me from sight."
He turned the glass once in his hand.
"I was kept in the house, though in truth I had always been kept there. The arrangement merely became more honest. I was no longer permitted beyond my room. No school. No roads. No Mat."
He smiled faintly.
"That was the difficult part."
"At first opium helped. Then it did not. I took more. Then the pills. After a time I began seeing him again in places where he could not possibly have been. I knew they were hallucinations. That never prevents them."
He looked towards the piano, then back at me.
"It must have been during that period that I first met my uncle, Don Vitelli DeSantino. My memory is not exact on chronology there. Suffering has a way of rearranging calendars. But I remember the day itself very clearly."
I leaned forward.
"Don Vitelli?"
"Oh yes," Joseph said. "Don Vitelli."
"I never understood what happened to him," I said. "He was supposed to have been the most feared man in the Cosca once. Then he vanished for years, and afterwards he returned as though nothing had interrupted him. What was that?"
Joseph smiled without amusement.
"A private war between brothers," he said. "The filthiest kind of politics, because it calls itself family."
He drew on the cigar.
"Tell me, Silvio. Why do men kill?"
I thought for a moment.
"Hatred," I said. "Envy. Fear. Revenge."
"You are not wrong," Joseph replied. "Those are the doorways. But they are not the room."
He tapped ash into the tray.
"The first killing may begin in hatred. That much is true. But the second rarely does. By then something else has entered."
"What?"
"Power."
He spoke the word quietly.
"When you first hold another life in your hand, something peculiar happens. All the noble explanations — hatred, justice, even revenge — begin to fall away. For one brief moment the act is emptied of motive. What remains is only the fact that you can."
He looked at me steadily.
"That is the intoxicant."
I said nothing.
"Men like to speak of evil as though it were a substance, a stain, some dark oil in the blood. I have never found that explanation persuasive. Most men kill for a simpler reason. For one moment they discover that the world yields to them."
He shrugged.
"And then they want to feel it again."
I turned the glass between my fingers.
"That still sounds like evil."
"Only because you are naming the feeling after the event," Joseph said. "That is how people think. They slip, they fall, they split open their heads on the floor, and afterwards they build a philosophy around the banana peel."
I looked up.
He smiled faintly.
"That is what we do with almost everything, Silvio. The accident comes first. Meaning limps behind it, trying to look dignified."
He took a slow drink.
"A man kills. Then everyone decides what sort of man he must have been in order to do it. The explanations arrive after the act like undertakers."
The room had grown darker while he spoke. Beyond the window the forest was becoming one unbroken surface.
"And innocence?" I asked. "What about that?"
Joseph gave a brief, almost tender laugh.
"Innocence is merely what the living call the dead when they wish to be outraged."
I frowned.
He saw it and softened slightly.
"No, listen. I do not mean children. I mean the category itself. Men are forever dividing the world into devils and innocents because it allows them to sleep. But the world does not divide so politely."
He leaned back.
"A good man is walking to prayer. A stone drops from a height nobody was measuring. His skull opens. The pious call it tragedy. The superstitious call it punishment. The philosophers call it contingency. The dead man calls it nothing at all."
I said quietly, "That is a bleak way to think."
"It is an accurate way to think."
A pause.
"Once you understand that, the old religious dramas begin to lose their charm. The world is not ruled by virtue against wickedness. It is ruled by collisions. Pressure. Timing. Slips. One brother inherits a title. Another inherits hunger. One man arrives five minutes late and lives. Another kneels in the wrong building and dies beneath the collapse of a roof."
He turned the cigar between his fingers.
"We call this justice when it flatters us, fate when it humbles us, and God when we do not know what else to call it."
I said, "That sounds very close to something I once read in a letter."
Joseph's eyes moved to me with renewed interest.
"Then perhaps your letter was written by someone who had begun to think."
I smiled slightly.
"Or by someone who had begun to lose his mind."
Joseph returned the smile.
"The two conditions are neighbours."
For a moment neither of us spoke.
Then I said, "You were talking about Don Vitelli."
"Yes," Joseph replied. "And in a way I still am. Vitelli understood all of this instinctively, which was why people feared him. He never pretended that power was moral. He treated it as weather."
He stood and crossed slowly to the window.
"He had a reputation for violence long before I was old enough to know what violence was. Not ordinary violence either. Public violence. The kind that embarrasses careful men."
He glanced back at me.
"My father disliked embarrassment. He wanted commerce, influence, respectable dinners, polished shoes, men who could ruin a rival without appearing to raise their voices. Vitelli belonged to an older species. The sort of man peasants turn into legends because fear is easier to remember when it has a face."
He returned to his chair.
"People respected Vitelli more than my father, and that was intolerable. My father was supposed to be the head of the family. Yet in certain places a man could achieve more merely by speaking Vitelli's name."
"And your father hated that."
"Of course. Influence is only pleasant when it is one's own."
He smiled.
"So he did what civilised men often do when confronted with a stronger barbarian. He refined his destruction."
I waited.
"He introduced Vitelli to dissipation. Slowly. Elegantly. Hashish, opium, powders, women, flatterers, parasites. A little indulgence here, a little admiration there. The whole operation was almost tender."
Joseph shrugged.
"Power is rarely overthrown by attack. More often it is invited to soften."
"And it worked?"
"For a time."
He looked at the smoke above us.
"Money went first. Then discipline. Then judgement. Then men began laughing where once they had lowered their eyes. There is no quicker fall than that."
He was silent for a moment, then continued.
"When I finally saw him, I was expecting a legend. What stood before me instead was a ruin."
His voice slowed.
"He was the tallest man I had ever seen, and also somehow the smallest. Addiction had reduced him without reducing his height. He shook continuously. His hands trembled with such violence that they seemed to belong to a different body."
Joseph smiled faintly at the memory.
"My mother used to say he was so handsome women could not look him in the eye. By the time I met him the face was still there, somewhere, but it had retreated behind exhaustion."
He glanced down at his own hand as though remembering the tremor.
"I remember staring at him from the shoes upward, travelling the full distance of him like a pilgrim climbing a tower, and thinking that if I had worn a hat that day it would have fallen off before I reached his head."
I laughed despite myself.
Joseph did not.
"It was not a comic sight," he said. "Only absurd. Which is usually worse."
He continued.
"He was in withdrawal. At the time I did not fully understand what that meant. I only knew he looked as though some invisible thing inside him was trying to escape through his skin."
He took another drink.
"I went to look for one of the servants and had a little herb brought to him. The effect was immediate. One minute his hands were shaking so badly he could barely lift them. A minute later they were steady enough to roll a perfect cigarette."
Joseph's expression altered slightly, almost reverently.
"That was my first lesson in substances. Not pleasure. Transformation."
He looked at me.
"He drew on the cigarette, exhaled, and became someone else."
"What did he say?"
Joseph smiled.
"He asked me, 'Boy, can you handle as much smoke as I can?'"
"And what did you say?"
"I said no."
Joseph touched the side of his jaw as if remembering it.
"He slapped me so hard I fell to the floor."
I stared.
"And then?"
"And then," Joseph said, "he informed me that I was not a DeSantino at all. Only a spoiled half-thing wearing the family name like an oversized coat."
He gave a brief laugh.
"I remember lying there thinking: this man is either insane or magnificent."
"Which was he?"
Joseph considered the question.
"At that moment? Both."
He crushed the ash into the tray with unnecessary care.
"To Vitelli, smoke was not recreation. It was ritual. A small, private liturgy of appetite. He treated intoxication the way monks treat prayer."
He looked up at me again.
"That was my real introduction to him."
"Not as a relative. Not as a legend."
"But as a man who had already crossed too far into excess to pretend he could return."