Scourge of Princes: Invisible Cities

By Paul Petillo

As book two opens, Nick Heath, a reporter for a free weekly newspaper has traveled to the east coast in pursuit of some background information about the most recent winner of the Hilton Humanitarian Award. Thirty years have passed since Santo Aretino made a hasty exit from his hometown. Nick revisits many of the people Santo had influenced and found a man dynamically split into fans and foes, friends and enemies, lovers and haters. The books ends with Santo's first leg of his journey into his future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Petillo
• Release date: Dec 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311566195

Paul Petillo

My first books were nonfiction titles focused on financial topics such as retirement planning, investing and personal finance. The first four books were published by McGraw-Hill (2004-2008). These works were based on the information found at BlueCollarDollar.com (founded in1999, now retired). Most of my online writing now consists of copywriting and SEO friendly content blogging for a variety of businesses as well as my work as a Zero Waste Consultant.I published my first novel "Scourge of Princes: Came of Age Too Soon" in July of 2014 - this was just updated recently to include some needed digital revisions along with some new focus on several characters. It is the first book of a trilogy following the unusual journey of a man with a slightly skewed moral compass. It is a story of isolation and loneliness with a dismal and dying east coast city as the backdrop. However, Santo Aretino is not impacted by this darkness and instead capitalizes on every opportunity and challenge. Book Two was published in December of 2014: "Scourge of Princes: Invisible Cities" and was also recently updated and expanded. Book Three, "Saint Aretino" is scheduled for release in 2020.I am married with four grown children and live in Portland, Oregon.

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Scourge of Princes: Invisible Cities

Book Two

Paul Petillo

Copyright © 2014 Paul Petillo

ISBN: 978-0-9829593-3-6

Smashwords Edition

All Rights Reserved

The characters and events in this book are fictional.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is coincidental

and not intended by the author.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To my muse, Bon.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One: Nick Heath

Chapter Two: Dina

Chapter Three: John Tell

Chapter Four: Kendris

Chapter Five: Melvin

Chapter Six: Dunkin’ Dan D’Aretin

Chapter Seven: Suzy Sandström

Chapter Eight: Louise

Chapter Nine: Seamus

Chapter Ten: Mrs. Reinhardt

Chapter Eleven: Mary and Hannah Beiler

Chapter Twelve: Santo

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

Matteo DeSilva did not anticipate that his new normal would be behind bars. He may have been on that trajectory for most of his life. And yet, when the judge passed down his sentence, it still came as a surprise. The surreal became real.

His demeanor, as someone could reasonably expect, also changed. Before incarceration, he was known as Matty the Slice. When he was a free man, it harkened back to a time when he brought leftover pizza to lunch every day at school. After he had been sentenced, it referenced his skill with sharp objects.

Before his arrest on a humid Saturday morning, he passed himself off as Italian. Matty was born Portuguese. The falsified Italian bloodline was simply an adaptation to his surroundings.

The confusion began long before Matty was born. Baltasar DeSilva fled criminal prosecution in Valença and emigrated to the U.S by way of Naples. Landing in south Philadelphia, he made a home in an Italian neighborhood where he adopted his new lineage by adapting to his surroundings. He raised his family amongst newly arrived immigrants and opening a pizza shop allowed him to continue his ruse, stay hidden and, at the same time, assimilate into the new world.

Matty's grandfather also realized that the predominant influence in his new neighborhood was the Cosa Nostra. It was almost unavoidable, and young Matty allowed himself to be swept up into their activities. Matty, the Slice, aka Matteo DeSilva, was technically not mob-eligible. His grandfather may have fooled immigration, but he could not mislead the Italians. Nonetheless, the bloodline did not preclude young Matty from being criminal.

The judge presiding over the Delaware County Court at the time he sentencing took place, the Honorable Willis DeShong, grandson of the late businessman turned philanthropist, had found Matty's crimes to be severe enough to imprison the young man. DeShong had the support of every court in the land, even if the type of offense he had committed, was only recently reaching the court system for prosecution. These drug trafficking trials were relatively new.

There had been drug busts in the past. Those arrests were often made at borders as smugglers sought to bring contraband into the U.S. However, the size of what the police seized in that early morning raid on his rented Chester house was unlike anything previously made in southeastern Pennsylvania. DeShong was proud to be part of the new sentencing guidelines and the precedent they set. He hoped the news would make it President Nixon's desk.

Arianne Robert's new normal was as yet determined. However, she knew it would be.

She could no longer be the wife her husband had hoped she would be, the woman who had vowed to live all of the traditional wedding promises, pledging her love in front of a church full of witnesses. Now, barely thirty years of age, childless, and in a career that promised she would be sitting behind a librarian's desk for as long as local funding provided the money to operate, she declared it ended. She had to move away.

She had to leave the man she once loved and married. And she had to leave the man she had never slept with, although Arianne once hoped she would. She had experienced both: a love requited and affection that was not. The former fit the traditions of the world in 1972; the latter would have found her criminal. The young man had been the smart one, the wiser of the two.

In some ways, it was the guilt of having considered it that torn at the fabric of her life. She had reasoned it as a coming of age story, a younger man sleeping with an older woman, a success story of sexual prowess, and a necessary step to manhood.

She dreamt she was an adulteress, the transgression of her wedding vows stared at her from the hundreds of faces that had gathered at her wedding, smiles turned to frowns, joy turned to dismay.

She dreamt she was a rapist, over and over, the world having marked her somehow as she passed each shadowy, accusatory face, and even though she did not use her position to coerce her young lover, they knew what she had done, using her femininity in an obscene way to corral the raging hormones of an unsuspecting teenager. She would shout to no one that it was not how it happened.

She dreamt about the harsh reality of having to love someone she must leave, the man who made her a criminal and leave someone she didn't love any longer.

Her husband had listened to those nocturnal musings, the wranglings of a mind ravaged in the darkness. And even though her husband had felt the distance grow between them during their waking hours, it was this nightly struggle with her demons that prepared him when the time came.

All he had to offer her was normal. He no longer felt equipped to explain the beauty of ordinary; as much as it suffers from sameness, it is liberating. Instead of stopping and looking and examining every nuanced change that occurs over a day or a lifetime, regular lets a person continue.

And then something, or in this instance, someone forces a person like the previously innocent Arianne to step outside of their version of normal. He watched her sleep, heard her mumble softly, arguing with the faceless stranger. He even listened to her lover's name, once, as she yelled Santo desperately.

So Arianne's husband told himself it was accidental, the result of a poor choice, listening to the voice in her heart rather than the common sense chatter he had hoped was in her head. But the thought dominated his daytime much the way it overwhelmed her night. He wondered if it was fate. He looked for the triggers that might send her into another man's embrace. He had even convinced himself that things just happen to good people who might be in the wrong place at the wrong time and are vulnerable, unaware of the unintended consequences. He wondered if her night terrors were guilt or the inability to ask for forgiveness.

Santo Aretino always struggled with normal. As a child, he would be like all children, beholden to the people in charge of his well-being. That indebtedness or dependence comes typically by birth, possibly by adoption or maybe by some other arrangement. With some exceptions, mostly because some adults can be unpredictable at times, normal is being coddled and cuddled, clothed and comforted, embraced, and loved as the adults in your vulnerable young life provide sustenance and stability.

Normal is what you know.

It is noticed only when it is absent.

Normal is a state of all questions answered, at least early on.

Santo would have benefited from some experience of ordinary. Instead, he believed it didn't exist.

Chapter One: Nick Heath

Nick Heath had only himself to blame. 

Don't become a journalist, he was told when he announced that he wanted to write for a newsworthy organization. 

Don't waste your time on a dead art, they added over beer. These were good friends with good intentions.

His counselors had warned him, also with his interest in mind, This is a dying profession. The few people left doing it are reading the news from prompters, not even reporting it. You know journalism is dead if television talking heads are instead asking for help from their audiences on what to report. Twitter twisted the knife. Buzzfeed dealt the deathblow.

Unless, he was told, you want to go to the front lines of war or report on the ugliest of human activities, they added, then he should can the idea altogether. 

Content is king, they said, except it paid pauper wages. 

It was a Greek chorus of naysayers. However, Nick was happiest when he was writing. Words tumbled from him in a weirdly organized manner, sentences lining up neatly in a logical way, paragraphs forming literary corrals around specific ideas. The joy of discovering a story within a story and filling the exact number of column inches, winning some sort of peer recognition. Each assignment had the potential to propel his name, his journalistic excellence into the spotlight he would have otherwise gone to great lengths to avoid. Nick had also become comfortable with the idea that true happiness simply didn't pay that well. 

As Nick navigated his way through the Philadelphia International Airport, these tidbits of sage advice were circling his thoughts. He was three thousand miles removed from the town he called home, a place where the rain was synonymous, the landscape was verdant and dotted with mountains as landmarks, a place where the world seemed to exist on coffee, legal weed, and tattoos. His adopted city was portrayed as laid back, liberal, and bit quirky, weird even. 

He did not welcome this excursion to the east coast. He fought his editor on the concept. He was aware of his obvious bias for the city with the ironic nickname suggesting some sort of familial affection. 

As he made his way through the terminal, he scanned the faces of travelers, the people cleaning the tabletops and emptying trash, the vendors. Did he see with prejudicial eyes, or were these people encased in angst, cocooned in their displeasure, trapped in or escaping from this place?  

He was aware of a study done years before this trip about happiness. That study suggested that place determine happiness. It possibly was location, location, location. And that might be applicable here as well. Could this historic old city, less international than New York to the north, not as superficially important than Washington D.C. to the south, possess a jocular side? His first impressions suggested otherwise. He was confident in his prejudice: this part of the country was not a likely place to find naked bike rides or strip clubs promoting vegan dining.

The dirty windows of the terminal failed to hide the thickness of the air as if it was weighted, a color gray he had never seen before. Unlike Portland, who experiences more than its fair share of overcast days, this world seemed joyless. This gray wasn't the color of fog or even of smoke. It was an absence of design as if someone had discarded a badly-mixed paint sample and chose to dump it across the atmosphere. 

Outside the crowded terminal, the atmosphere took on a different hue, more substantial but not necessarily wet, humid, but not oppressively so. The air seemed to have considerable volume. No one seemed to have noticed. 

At the car rental counter, he asked for a luxury upgrade and, if possible, an SUV type. Nick was barely five foot five inches tall, and he enjoyed stepping up into a vehicle. 

Sara, an administrative assistant at the weekly paper footing the bill for this journey, had never traveled more than ninety miles from Portland. 

Sorry, Nick, no hotels in Chester.

What's that tell you?

Tells me that there are no hotels in Chester. 

And that doesn't strike you as odd? Travel arrangements were not usually part of her daily activities. The publication rarely sent a reporter outside of the general area. 

No. She did not elaborate. While her search didn't turn up any hotels in the city itself, what she meant was 'hotels the company would pay for,' current policy forbidding Airbnb or bed and breakfast types of accommodations.

Nick liked Sara. She had worked her desk since before he arrived. Her phone voice was smooth and sultry and without any intent to be sexy. Even she had joked, I could make a lot more money as phone sex operator. No one disagreed.

Philadelphia, of course, had many hotel choices. Some are circling the airport, others located downtown, which, it turns out to be in the opposite direction of where you need to be. Not a good sign, Nick thought. 

Even Rwanda has hotels, she added when she gave him his itinerary. 

Rwanda is a country. Chester is, and he hesitated, not quite the same.

Oh, I know that. But it is sort of telling, don't cha think?

Maybe. Perhaps, it isn't exactly a tourist spot. Nick had done some research on the city before taking the flight to the east coast. It had, at one time in its historical past, been wealthy and vibrant and, by some accounts, where the people from Philly came to party at one time. Its current history held fewer savory notations, listing it as an excellent place to get murdered.

All I know is, and she hesitated before speaking, you better be careful, mister.

That's not all you know. 

She booked him at the Embassy Suites, about halfway down the Delaware Expressway from the airport and halfway to his destination. She liked Nick, perhaps to the point of infatuation. And because she wanted to keep all of 'her reporters' safe, Sara did not mention that Chester did indeed have a hotel. There was a Best Western located near the Weidner University, self-described as casual, whatever that meant. She decided against it. She, too, had stumbled on the same murder statistic.

Nick followed a confusing series of loops that guided him in the right direction; his phone was often instructing him to take an exit or a turn with little notice. 

The pleasantly British voice guided him down a three-lane, concrete road that sliced through open wetlands, raced headlong past discarded stretches of landscapes, passing ghosted structures lounging in the distance. Nick had researched this trip to exhaustion, using Google Earth to see his destination, Google maps to map his travel on roads like this, and Google search to create some sort of background as to why this historic destination remained home to thirty-thousand people. 

He was here for only one reason: the subject of the story he was writing once called this place home. Chester was the depressed hometown of the most recent winner of the Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Award.

You surprise me sometimes, Nick, his girlfriend had told him as she drove him to the airport in his car. Here, you have this opportunity of a lifetime to at least venture into the city to see…

See what? This trip is not a vacation, Che. It's work.

But who doesn't take a moment for themselves on a work trip?

He looked at her, but she kept her eyes on the road. She was an excellent driver but not a confident one; hands held ten-to-two, eyes darting from road to rearview mirror to side mirror, alert to her surroundings. 

You know me better than that. Or at least I thought you did. The exit for the airport commanded them to take a north-south highway. I've been there before.

Yeah, you said. But you were also a kid. Chester might not be so bad this time. They had this conversation several times before they got into the car. She was trying to lighten his mood. 

It wasn't bad then, either, or I don't remember it that way. She knew that it was the separation nagging at him. This trip would be a first for their relationship. They were both fiercely independent and stubbornly opinionated, and yet, Nick and Che felt something beyond kindred when they were together. She did not want him to go either but refused to add fuel to his argument.

Maybe I'm waiting to be surprised.

Exit 6 rose off the freeway and threw Nick into a much closer view of the city he had visited only once before as a child. As the road ascended, there were row houses on the left and Widener University on the right, a sprawling campus that once housed Penn Military Academy. The university still had a barrack-like appearance despite some modern additions. The small sign, looking like more of an afterthought, welcomed him, 'Chester, settled in 1644'. He turned north onto Edgemont Avenue.

Nick was chasing the wildest of leads. His editor, an alarmingly pleasant man who hid behind an otherwise gruff exterior, had long been fascinated by a single private citizen at the source of one of the most significant philanthropic enterprises in the northwest, second only to the founder of Microsoft. 

This fascination wasn't an effort to keep the billionaire's obituary up-to-date. It wasn't just his journalistic curiosity, either. 

Somewhere along the line, Nick, and I can't put my finger on the exact moment, I got the feeling that the man had something to hide. It was that hunch that found his best profile reporter three thousand miles from where he wanted to be doing what his editor thought might be worth pursuing. Zoti, a pleasant man with a gruff exterior, or to others, the complete opposite was not a man who ignored his inner reporter. Nor do I try to explain what my hunch is. Nick suspected there was more but hesitated for whatever reason.

Santo Aretino arrived in the Pacific Northwest almost forty years ago. In a relatively short space of time, the man had become a northwest institution. And to the surprise of many, he did this with little fanfare. While most of his peers relished the sight of their names on new hospital wings or emblazoned on their pet projects to vaccinate the world, Santo hid from the spotlight. People knew of him but very little about him. 

He managed to create a legacy through his wife, Marley. 

A great deal is known about her, Nick. Sara was reading the research she had done on the Aretino couple. She's a native of the Pacific Northwest. She's the Chairwoman and CEO of SA Holdings, daughter of a prominent attorney and businessman named Abrahamson, and she changed her name at a relatively young age to Cornish. No reason that I could dig up. She's well-educated as you might expect and disarmingly attractive. Her marriage to Aretino was never celebrated publicly, and the two of them lived in relative seclusion on the edge of the city.

How long have they been married?

Almost 40 years, near as I can tell.

And no one knows who he is, Joanie added. She said this spoken as a statement rather than a question. We have some shots of him, but they're quick. And it's not like he's trying to hide. We know where he lives.

So, how did the Hilton folks find him?

Sara offered, I'll bet his people are curious about the same thing.

When Santo Aretino was chosen to be the latest in a long line of honorees of the Hilton award, not only did this catch him and his wife unaware, it caught the company's public relations department off-guard as well. 

The Hilton award had almost as much prestige as the Nobel or Pulitzer. A cash prize also accompanied it. 

The Portland Riverfront Weekly took pride in first, being free, and secondly, on knowing whatever the city needed to know about its persons, places, and things. Under Zoti's leadership, the paper won numerous investigative awards both locally and nationally. These awards were all displayed above the water cooler on a precarious shelf.

When Zoti chose Nick for the assignment, he was not the least bit interested in his best reporter following the trail of some rich guy. Nick was correct; this usually would have been a Joanie story.

We need to know the background. This is more than a profile, Nick. It's an investigation.

That's not typical, boss. For a man who hasn't done anything wrong.

"It would be a profile if the subject was somehow courageous or had done something truly remarkable. You know, such as overcoming all odds. This is not that.

"Wealthy people are rich are either give or take. The takers have money because of real talent. The givers happen to have been born into it, inherit it, that sort of thing, Nick. This either-or scenario makes rich folks neither remarkable for working harder or climbing the corporate ladder and stepping on every fuck along the way. Admittedly, some are nice to the crushed bodies along the way, even revered. Hard work is hard work. Having more money as a result of it is not noteworthy.

"And then there are those poor fucks who have defiantly defied the odds by being born to the right parents. Not noteworthy, either.

I want to know how he made his money.

SA Holdings in private, but they do disclose a lot of what they do. Everyone who could write was in the room with Zoti, Nick, Joanie, and Sara, who had given her part of the presentation.

"Nick, the makers of money all leave a trail of dead and defeated bodies on their quest to that wealth. And once they had achieved that rarified and stratospheric level of affluence known by only a few, they then begin to disperse some of that money philanthropically. Always a noble gesture with a focus on glossing over history.

What is it, Zoti? Are you going to tell me why you have a hard-on for this guy? Nick wanted no part in trying to coax a story out of such an individual. 

Santo Aretino falls into a different category, Zoti said. He knew he took a chance bringing the whole team together for this meeting. He had hoped Nick would be a little more agreeable with a crowd.

Who the fuck is Santo Aretino? That's the question you want me to ask?

Look, Nick, no one is sure whether this guy showed up wealthy, but it is probably safe to assume...

Assume what, exactly? Since when are we in the assumption business.

We're not. Maybe Aretino showed up penniless and he's just a great American success story. Maybe there is no legacy money. Maybe it was the wife's money.

Still sounds like a human interest story. Joanie does human interest stories. Give it to her, for chrissakes. No matter who Joanie wrote about, no matter how repulsive the subject might have been, she was able to coax some weakness that made the reader sympathetic to the person's plight. Hardened criminals received an empathetic twist suggesting a wrong choice made once set a whole string of bad decisions in motion. When Joanie finished with crooked politicians, you felt compassion for their families and anyone they might have embarrassed. And although none of these portrayals ever changed the public's or the court's attitude towards the crime, the person was often thought of as some sort of evil vessel rather than a determined individual with free will.

I agree, Joanie said, but I also agree with Zoti that there is something there beyond just warm and fuzzy.

Do you? Nick replied. You two have talked about this?

We did.

This is still bullshit. He wanted to stand. He could feel the eyes of his coworkers on him.

He won't be worth the money you are spending, boss. His voice now sounded defeated.

There was also a slight infliction on the word boss, conjuring up an image of a young Paul Newman used in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Nick and his father watched the video whenever it was on a motel television. They enjoyed the independent, don't fuck-with-me style of the imprisoned lead character. 

Can you imagine, Nicky, his father would say, and I hope you never do, son, what it'd be like to stuck serving a prison term in the heat and humidity of Florida? Get's gawdawful sticky down there.

Did they really send men to prison for just decapitating parking meters? They did, boy. His father had told him, Just remember, defiance is not a character flaw; Nicky, it is how a man stands for what he believes in. I'm not saying what he did was right, or the punishment fit the crime. And it doesn't mean picking only fights you can win or being a sore loser. Nope. It means giving people your opinion. Just not shoved down their throats. Luke was defiant. But not too smart defiant."

Nick hung tightly to the few moments he had with his father. When I see you, I see Luke. Luke is in your blood, boy. Luke is your spirit animal.

Nick decided to put his inner Luke away.

"Something isn't right about this guy, Nick. And