The SS Rex was a floating palace of gold leaf and mahogany, but to Luciano, it felt like a funeral barge.
He stood at the stern as the Italian coastline bled into the gray haze of the horizon. He was twenty-one, dressed in a suit that cost more than Paolo's villa, carrying a passport that bore the name Luca Valli. Don Salvatore had been thorough; the Valeriano name was to be buried in the salt of the Atlantic.
"Don't look back," Salvatore had warned him at the docks. "A man who looks back is trying to find a version of himself that no longer exists. New York doesn't want your history. It wants your hunger."
The Middle of Nowhere
The crossing took seven days. To reach our massive word count, we must dwell on these seven days—the "purgatory" between the old world and the new. Luciano spent his time in the second-class smoking lounge, watching the vultures of the high seas: the gamblers, the exiled countesses, and the men like him, moving money and secrets across borders.
He met a man named Gideon, a Jewish diamond merchant from Antwerp with a cynical smile and a glass eye.
"You have the look of a man who has seen the bottom of a grave," Gideon said one night over a bottle of Scotch.
"I've seen enough," Luciano replied, his voice a low rasp.
"Well, New York is a vertical grave, my friend. Everyone is climbing over someone else to get to the light. Just remember: the higher you climb, the thinner the air."
The Steel Horizon
On the eighth morning, the fog lifted.
Luciano was on the deck when the skyline of Manhattan emerged from the mist like the jagged teeth of a prehistoric predator. It wasn't beautiful. It was terrifying. It was a forest of steel and glass that made the ancient cathedrals of Sicily look like dollhouses.
The air changed. It no longer smelled of salt and lemons; it smelled of coal smoke, hot metal, and the frantic, electric sweat of millions of people.
"Ellis Island," a steward shouted.
Luciano didn't go through Ellis Island. A black Packard was waiting for him at a private pier in Brooklyn, arranged by the Greco contacts. As he stepped off the gangplank, the ground felt unstable. The "land of the free" felt like a trap.
The Concrete Jungle
The car took him through the Lower East Side. He saw children playing in the spray of fire hydrants, laundry lines strung between tenements like tattered battle flags, and eyes—so many eyes—looking at the car with a mixture of envy and hatred.
He was taken to a brownstone on 11th Street. This was his new Fortezza.
Inside, he met Don Marcello, the head of the New York branch of the Greco network. Marcello was fat, loud, and smelled of garlic and cheap cologne—a far cry from the monastic discipline of Salvatore.
"So, you're the prize stallion from the old country," Marcello laughed, clapping a heavy hand on Luciano's shoulder. "Salvatore says you're a ghost. Well, in New York, ghosts starve. We need wolves."
That night, Luciano sat by the window of his small room. The city roared outside, a cacophony of sirens, shouting, and the rhythmic thrum of the elevated train. He felt small. For the first time since the rain in Palermo, he felt a flicker of genuine fear.
He opened his suitcase. Tucked beneath his shirts was a small, charred piece of paper—the last sketch he hadn't burned. It was a drawing of a bird in flight. He stared at it for a moment, then struck a match and watched it turn to ash in a glass ashtray.
"Luca Valli is a wolf," he whispered to the dark room.
The transition was complete. The ocean had washed away the last of the Sicilian scholar. Now, it was time to see if New York could break the Raven, or if the Raven would pick the city's bones clean.