RL paused and looked over at Jamie. He rubbed his chin, as if that morning’s shave hadn’t been close enough, and pursed his lips, made a tight sucking sound. The cars on the freeway roared past them and RL leaned in to be a little closer.
“Well as you can imagine, the nephew was more than a little surprised. Not at the secret or that another successful family had come from their little village on Sicily. But he couldn’t understand why his uncle was letting him in on this information. So he asked, ‘That is astonishing, uncle, truly good fortune.Respectfully, though, I must ask why you are telling me about it now.’
“‘Joseph,’ the uncle answered, ‘I am telling you because I wonder if you can make something more out of this than your father or I have. We must be very careful to use this precious thing as little as possible so that it is never discovered and we never bring shame to our friends and their family. Few times we have had favors from these men, yes, but important ones. Times are changing though, I have seen many things in the last decade that I never expected. Change has come to this thing of ours and we would be well advised to find a new way to continue. So I tell you because you have studied things very different from what your father and I, and all our friends to tell the truth, know anything about.
“‘Now your education is complete and you come home to join with us. We are very proud of what you have achieved, even if these machines are a mystery to us. I have been thinking that perhaps you can find ways to help us move beyond our troubles, perhaps these new machines can help, but I want you to know of all the important resources that we possess so that you may do your best.’
“‘Uncle,’ Joseph said, ‘I thank you for your confidence and trust. I will do my best to live up to them. This brings to mind a saying my professors had: garbage in, garbage out. I know, I know, what does trash have to do with computers? But this simply means that if you put bad information into a calculation, you cannot end up with a good result.'”
RL said that the two men shook hands and parted, the younger wanting time to sleep and ponder his new assignment. And surprising to his family, thogh it would not have surprised his teachers, he approached the task as if he were researching and writing a new thesis for school rather than a business plan to modernize La Cosa Nostra. He went to the office with his father, went on rounds with his uncle, sat in on meetings they had with other capos. Joseph, or Little Joe as he was called, spent the summer listening to music his family would never appreciate and devising the most brilliant criminal business model anyone had ever thought of.
BillSaysThis 