"This Paulo, is he still alive?" he said drawing out a gun from his jacket "he is, but he is kneeling and bound." The henchman said as he chased behind Caputo.
This was the kind of thing that caused wars, cities buried their young for one man's sin, for getting in Caputo's way, he had the backing of god himself and Venice shock were she stood when he walked the streets, and he was always in the streets. Just like his boss, he was the messiah to some, and the devil to others but regardless of which side of the coin you stood, it was best to stay out of Caputo's way. "Prepare yourselves," said Caputo.
At the edge of the bridge was Paulo who laid flat on the floor along with his cohorts who were now doing the same in united apology. "What are you doing?" asked Caputo as he spread his legs looking into the waters. "Capitano, please" Paulo begged "Have mercy"
"Get up Paulo, you and your men." The Czechs resisted, pulling Paulo and his men back to ground and dragging them farther away from Caputo. "I asked you a question, what are you doing?" he said, head facing the ground, eyes almost bleeding red with rage. The Czechs remained silent and after a moment too long of waiting for answers, Caputo left them at the bridge, his henchman following him, like a child to his mother, they walked the length of the bridge all the way back to the car where Caputo stopped and said, "let one tell the story." He got into the car and drove a few yards away from the other cars.
It was like heavy rain came down from the heavens, as bullets flew like sparrows on top of still water. The Czechs fell wood being felled by a raging butcher with a chainsaw. It happened so fast that barely a bullet was released by the Czechs and just like that, it was over. One man remained of the twenty Czechs. The boatman from the canal.
They dragged him through the bridge to Caputo who was now fuming for the delay.
"I hear you Czechs are strong and can handle anything. I admire that. I will only ask once, after that, I will hurt you in ways so cruel that you will beg to be killed just to test your strength, and when you ask to die, I will make sure you live another day, and another and another till your body can take it no more and you will fade in life into oblivion." Caputo said while playing with his gun. "Now, boatman. What was this about?"
"The league wants answers, this is our way of requesting for it." The boatman said barely phased by the threats. Caputo stayed silent for a long time thinking. He was a thinker, that was his job, and when he had come down from his temple he said, "You will come back to me boatman. Tell Porto that he now has an enemy in Don Vincente." He said as he signaled for the fleet to move forward.
Caputo's henchmen put a specially curved hook that can only be removed by its maker into the boatman's face, tearing mercilessly into his skin as he screamed his lungs out.
ACE VINCENTE
There have been very few men in Italy in the modern-day that have climbed half as high as Vincente in the pecking order in both society and the mafia. He has revered by the world all over Italy as the godfather to who all owed allegiance. His system and reign spanned through all the nukes and crannies of the country for which he had establishments in virtually every city that you could mention.
The name Don Vincente was so popular that the government had to place restrictions on couples who were expecting or had just put to bed, because virtually everyone who could have a son, wanted to name their sons after him. The Vincente name grew stronger and more popular still, so the government decided to offer payments to newlyweds and expecting couples when they had their sons to boycott the name. as if that was not enough, it was recorded not too long after, that the name had now found a way to transcend the gender unspoken restrictions that came with it. Now the whole of Italy had girls called Vincente. Thus was the sort of noise and popularity that came with the man.
Though he was not a politician, he was brought out at large invariant speech to rub shoulders with the likes of Benito Mussolini, the great Marco Polo, Agostino Depretis, the great Julius Caesar, and maybe a name from more recent times, Silvio Berlusconi himself. He was the sun during the day and the moon at night to many.
Barely forty-five years old, this god in flesh had risen so high that, he was untouchable. Amongst his pairs, and colleagues at large, he was the youngest man alive ever to be made in the history of the Italian mafia at the tender age of twenty-seven. What this meant was that he could have done anything and gotten away with it because he had the protection he needed. Even God himself could not touch him, God himself. By the time he was thirty years old, he led his horse for which he represented as the right-hand man and adopted son of Don Matteo Manzoni to war in the great war of the five houses. Ace was already a force to be reckoned with. And you can imagine just how brutal a man he was, not only because he was obligated to be, but because you and everyone who knew him could tell that he enjoyed it. He was a soldier of death, the bringer of death himself.
Ace Vincente on his own with a small group of five took down the opposing houses one at a time alone whilst the war broke heavily in the city with the police and government officials nowhere to be found. As the story goes, he returned home victorious but at a price too dire to bear. "War takes from us all," he said, as he cut down the last remaining made men who stood as oppositions to his new reign.
With Don Manzoni gone, Ace Vincente was next in line to the throne. Since then, the whole of Italy has found no one else to call god but Ace Vincente himself. His word was the law and though the police was present, they all reported to him, the new king of the Italian mafia.
In Sicily, there was a rise and change in power similar to his, a man called Danilo Di Cassano, who was revered and perhaps seen by many to be as ruthless and fearsome as Ace himself, but could one compare the two when one gave power to the other?