that struck fear into everybody, a light in his eyes which silenced everybody near him, and then he had called his consigliere an idiot shit, and now he saw that respect that he believed due to him. The Guest coughed again, belched again, and yawned, and his Host broke the grip of their hands and their cheeks brushed in friendship. They were equals. The Guest assumed that a similar meal would be taken with the family from Catania. They were equals because they each had control of territory and resources and men. The time of the single rule of Riina, the time of the killings and massacres, the time of fear, was over.
The hands of his Host rested on the Guest's bony shoulders, he could no longer see his face nor, against the light from the window, could he see the faces of the men across the table from him. He did not want to be on the road to Canicatti after darkness. He wanted the business done, the understanding sealed between equals. He felt the hands dig into the bones of his shoulders. The business to he done was both a matter of the division of interests, and the guarantee of consultation between the family of Catania in the east and the family of Agrigento in the south and the family of his Host in the north and west. Business to be done, business to be sealed. The hands of his Host were off his shoulders. They were close to his ear, first stretched out so that the joints of the fingers cracked as they flexed, then clenched together, and from the side of his vision he saw the whiteness of the knuckles as they clenched. He thought that both the family of Catania and the family of his Host needed his arsenal of experience. He thought they required the experience gained from a long lifetime. He was the day labourer's son who had never lost the common touch of the land and of poverty. He was needed. He belched. He was so relaxed. He started to twist in his chair to face his Host. He did not see the quick movement as his Host made the sign of the cross. He.. .
The fingers and thumbs of the hands of the Host were around the throat of the Guest.
The men across the table from the Guest were rising from their chairs.
Against the ears of the Guest were the cuffs of the Host's jacket, ordinary material.
The Guest saw the coarse skin of the back of the Host's hands. The hands were locked on his throat.
The Guest struggled fiercely. He lashed out with his legs, as if he were attempting to kick himself clear of the hold of the fingers and the weight of the hands and the pressure of the thumbs. The chair on which he had sat lurched backwards. He was sliding on his back across the wood-block floor of the dining alcove, but always the strength was in the hands around his throat. The croaked cry for help was deep in his chest and stifled, while his eyes, staring and bulging, searched for the door of the main living area through which his grandson and his driver should burst with their guns, and they did not come… Not to know, in his kicking throes, that a stabbing knife had taken the life of his grandson in the apartment's kitchen, that his driver was gagged and trussed in the hall beside the outer door. Not to know that five men had come with his Host into the apartment…
The Guest fought for his life until the will to resist was lost in his old body.
He was on the carpet. He was choking for breath and a little of the pulp from the tomatoes of his salad ran from his lips onto the carpet, and the piss flow came on his upper thigh and into the cloth of his trousers. The face above him, another old face, but flabby and jowled, had the sweat of effort running on it, and there was laughter at the mouth of the face and there was cold light in the eyes of the face. One of the men from across the table held the Guest's sparse hair, the other of the men from across the table sat on his legs, both made it easier for the Host, whose hands never loosened their hold and whose thumbs gouged down onto his windpipe.
It helped him not at all that as a child he had seen the Fascist Cesare Mori, that as a teenager he had met Don Calogero Vizzini, that as a young Man of Honour he had carried messages to the bandit Salvatore Giuliano… Nothing could help him. He seemed to hear the caution of his consigliere in the dawn in the hills above Canicatti…
He tried to shout that his Host was a shit, cunt, bastard… He wished that he could warn the man who was his friend, the head of the family of Catania… He knew it could last for ten minutes, the strangulation of a man. He knew it because he had done it. The sweat beads fell down from his Host's face and onto his own, and into his own gasping mouth, and he thought he could taste the salt of the sweat. He did not try to cry for mercy. Those last moments, before consciousness slipped from him, he tried only to maintain his dignity. If he kept his dignity, then he would have also the respect… the need for respect was so great. He saw the face above him, he heard the cackling of the laughter and the grunted effort. He was slipping… It was right that the old man from Canicatti should die at the hand of his equal. I hat was the mark of the respect in which he was held. He was gone…
All the men bent over the still figure on the carpet from Iran laughed and sweated and gasped to soak the air back into their lungs. It was a joke. It was to be laughed at, the way they had fallen on the floor and slid across the wood blocks like kids playing.
And in he laughed at too was the way that the old goat's tongue had come half out of his throat, and his eyes half out of their sockets.
The rain beat on the windows of the apartment. The mist shrouded the mountains above Palermo.
The body of a rival was roped in the old way, the way used to throttle a goat, the way of the incaprettamento, so that when thestiffness of death gripped the body, it would already be small withthe rope tied to the ankles and hooking them up towards the small of the Guest's spine and then reaching up to the back of the Guest's throat No symbol, just convenience. It was convenient to use the old way because then it would be easier to lift the stiffened body into the boot of a car. The body of the Guest would leave the apartment via the service lift from the kitchen to the underground car park beneath the block, and the body of the grandson, and the driver who was tied and bound and gagged and who had the terror in his eyes because he loved life more than respect.
As the lift was called, as the men came from the kitchen to clean the furniture of the borrowed apartment of fingerprints and forensic evidence, and to wipe the vomited tomato dribble from the carpet, and to swab the urine from the marble flooring of the hallway, the Host breathed hard as if the effort required to strangle a man taxed his strength to its limit, and the words came in panted spurts as he repeated what should be done to his Guest's driver. His Guest had been offered, in life and death, respect. The grandson of his Guest was a necessary cadaver, a matter without emotion. The driver of his Guest, strapped and gagged tight, faced a bad death, a bad death for a bad remark made seventeen months before by the driver, a bad remark in a bar about a Man of Honour, a bad remark that had been relayed and was long remembered.
Later, when the two bodies and the live prisoner were taken in a car and a van from the underground car park, the Host massaged the numbness from his hands.
Later, when the two bodies and the live prisoner were carried in the wet dusk from the vehicles to a small launch moored to a quayside west of the city, the Host tapped on a Casio calculator the figures and percentages and profit margins for a deal that would send 87 kilos of refined heroin to the United States of America.
Later, when the two bodies and the live prisoner were weighted with crab pots filled with stones and were slipped into the dark waters of the Golfo di Palermo, the Host satisfied himself that the apartment was cleansed of evidence and let himself out of the main door and locked it behind him.
He disappeared into the night that caught the city, was lost in it from view.
Chapter One
'Do we have to have that damn thing on?'
'God, you found a voice. Hey, that's excitement.'
' All I'm saying – do we have to have the damn heater thing on?'
'Just when I was going to get wondering whether the Good Lord had done something violent with your tongue, knotted it – yes, I like to have the heater on.'
It was the last day of March. They'd left the three-lane highway lar behind. They'd turned off the two-lane highway long ago, and a hit after they'd cut through the town of Kingsbridge. When the y, uy driving had dumped the road map on his lap and told him to tai l the navigation bit, they'd left the last bit of decent track. The guy driving used the word 'lane' for what they were on now, and the map called it 'minor road'. The lane, the minor road, seemed in him to coil round the fields that were behind the high hedges that had been brutalized the past autumn by cutting equipment and had not yet taken on the spring's foliage. The high hedges and the fields beyond seemed dead to him. They bent round the angles of the fields, they dropped with the flow of the lane into dips and . limbed small summits, and when they reached the small summits he could see in the distance the grey-blue of the sea and the white caps where the wind caught it. It was not raining now. It had rained most of the drive out of
